Leigh: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. My name is Leigh Johnson, and I am so pleased to be joined by my fabulous co-hosts, Devonya Havis and Rick Lee. Today, we’re going to be talking about responsibility.

But before we get into that, as usual, we want to get some drink orders and some rants or raves. So, Rick, what are you drinking?

Rick: Today, I’m drinking a Fat Pug by Maplewood Brewery. It’s their version of an oatmeal stout, and it really is appropriately named. It’s a stout that kind of, if you think about it, tastes a little bit like a fat pug. It doesn’t taste like dog, but, you know, it just has that stacked, built feeling.

Leigh: I like that you said it doesn’t taste like dog… as if you know what dog tastes like.

Rick: Oh, you know what dog tastes like, Leigh.

Devonya: Like chicken.

[Laughter]

Leigh: Uh-oh, we’ve already lost a co-host.

[Laughter]

Rick: I’m okay, I’m okay. Today I am raving about jazz and bossa nova singer Karen Souza.

So, I’m always on the lookout for a great jazz vocalist, and there are a lot of young people out there today doing really great work. Karen Souza is an Argentinian who has a remarkable voice that is, strangely, at the same time, both very modern and very old school.

Leigh: Devonya, what about you?

Devonya: I’m going to have a phony Negroni.

Leigh: So, I don’t know—what is a phony Negroni?

Devonya: A phony Negroni is a Negroni with no alcohol.

Rick: Yeah, they’re making all sorts of non-alcoholic “spirits” these days—non-alcoholic gin, bourbon, whiskey…

Devonya: And today, I’m raving about Handel’s Messiah, the soulful version. It came out in the mid-90s, was a collaboration put together by Quincy Jones, and it is an ensemble of various musicians reinterpreting Handel’s Messiah with an African American musical tint. And in keeping with my usual fashion, I, of course, am playing Christmas music—or music that is associated with Christmas—way after Christmas. But I kind of enjoy it year-round, and why not?

Rick: Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: Today, I’m going to be drinking a Guinness, and I have to say that prior to my recent visit to England and Ireland, I had never had a Guinness before. I don’t know how I lived my whole life without ever drinking a Guinness, but now I feel like I’ve tasted the best and I should probably never have any more again. But I did have more than a single person’s fair share while I was there. And I am raving about clementines.

This is also related to my recent trip. On the flight back from Manchester, I was given a diabetic-friendly meal on the plane, and it included a clementine, which I had never had. And I was unaware that they made these very tiny, delicious oranges that don’t spike your blood sugar like big, fat, normal oranges do.And now I’m just completely addicted to clementines. So yay for clementines!

All right, so today we are talking about responsibility. And Rick, this is your topic. How do you want this conversation to go?

Rick: Many years ago, when I first started therapy, my therapist said to me, “You’re not responsible for others’ feelings.”

And I get what he’s saying. I think he meant that others can come to feel sad or angry about something that maybe I’ve done or said that is not caused—or maybe not solely caused—by what I did or said. But in another sense, I now think he might have been completely wrong.

Because, first, if I’m the one who brought about the feeling, am I not responsible? At least in some way? And then second—and maybe even perhaps more important—if that other person is a friend, or if they’re someone I love, shouldn’t I take up responsibility for that feeling?

But in that case, responsibility is not directly tied to whether I’m the cause or not. That is, I can be responsible—or maybe I am responsible—for things of which I’m not the cause at all.

Causation can’t be the entire story because if a rock falls on my head as I’m walking by, I don’t think anyone would say that the rock is responsible for my death. So is it just a specific form of causation, like maybe moral agency, that relates to responsibility?

But then there’s another sense of responsibility that looks, I think, at the situation from the other direction.

So in a company, a manager might be responsible for 20 employees. Or, in many universities, faculty have sole responsibility for the curriculum.

Now, this sense seems somewhat divorced from causation as well, because if one of the manager’s employees did something wrong, the manager, we say, is responsible, even if they’re not the cause of that.

Then, on the negative side, I remember in 2016 many U.S. citizens saying that Donald Trump was, quote, “not my president.” Was this a shirking of responsibility? Isn’t he your president? Aren’t we responsible for that? Can a group or a collective be responsible?

Now, as we sit here in the hotel bar talking about this issue, we’ll take responsibility for what we say and we’ll take on the responsibility of getting to the bottom of it all.

Leigh: Speak for yourself.

Devonya: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ll take responsibility for getting to the bottom of it all, but I will be responsible for my words.

—

Rick: In preparing to talk with you both about responsibility, I started with the word because literally it contains response and ability—that is, the ability to respond or offer a response. If we stick just with that—and maybe we want to throw it out as not being relevant to, let’s say, either a philosophical sense of responsibility or a robust sense of responsibility—but if we keep the idea of the ability to respond, does responsibility have anything to do with fault or blame, or even agency for that matter? That is, if it’s simply the ability to respond, then it doesn’t seem like we’re looking to find out who did this.

Devonya: I like the idea of keeping the response and the able to respond because it strikes me that this is part of what we mean when we begin to talk about moral agency. It’s not just that one has the capacity, but also a duty or obligation to be engaged, to respond. And maybe moral culpability comes when one is not responsive or when one responds in an adverse way.

I want to keep the capacity to respond as part of responsibility, but I’d also like to add the idea that one needs to increase their capacity to respond to certain things.

Leigh: I want to piggyback on Devonya’s point there. At least when we’re talking about moral responsibility, we’re talking about the ability to respond as a—what I would call—a free moral subject.

We did an episode on moral subjectivity several seasons ago where we talked about NIETZSCHE’s Genealogy of Morals, particularly paragraph 13. Basically, NIETZSCHE’s argument there was that one of the things morality requires is the invention, in his words, of something like a free subject that can be credited or blamed for things.

The freedom is important because if I’m going to be credited or blamed for something, it must be the case that I could have done otherwise—I could have chosen otherwise. And so whatever response I gave or enacted is something I can be credited for or blamed for. I can take responsibility for it or be assigned responsibility for it because, as a free moral subject, I could have done otherwise.

Rick: Can I poke at that just a little bit? Because I’m wondering how far that has to go. Let me put it this way: in the law, we could point to all sorts of mitigating factors. These are often ways in which my action has been impacted—another word for that might be caused—by things other than myself.

It might be my family history, my economic circumstances, my brain chemistry, or addiction—things that suggest I’m actually not free, or at least not totally free, in this. And yet, I’m still held responsible.

Leigh: Can I choose a slightly easier example of what I think you’re getting at here? If I were to walk down the street and rob the corner store, people would say, “You’re responsible for robbing the corner store,” right? I am the direct forensic cause of that crime.

But if I put a gun to your head, Rick, and say, “If you don’t go down to the corner store and rob it, then I’m going to kill you,” most of us would still say that I, Leigh—not you, Rick—am responsible for robbing the corner store.

The reason is that in that scenario, you have more or less stopped being a free moral agent. You’ve just become a tool for me to rob the corner store, right? You’re no different than a gun or whatever else people might use to rob a store. You’re just a non-free instrument in something that ultimately I am responsible for.

Obviously, it gets more complicated when we’re talking about other forms of coercion. Do I stop being free if I have an addiction? Or if I have a traumatic family history? Or other things of that ilk? I’m not sure they’re exactly the same, but they’re not entirely different either.

Devonya: This seems to get at what Rick was asking about causation and responsibility, and I want to throw in—just to make it a little spicier—the distinction between blameworthiness and responsibility.

One cannot be at fault for something, and yet one sometimes has a responsibility to respond to it.

Rick: Thank you, and I could not possibly agree more. To the extent that we could say, “I am responsible for—or I should be responsible for—things of which I am not the cause,” I think my freedom to do or not to do is not necessarily central to the question of responsibility.

Leigh, could I maybe trick your inner SartreAN to come out and say that your gun-to-the-head example is not an example of me not being free—that I am free to still say no?

Leigh: You absolutely could. That’s a great question, and I want to just put it in brackets for a second so that I can instead say that I could not possibly disagree with you both more.

I think when we’re saying someone is blameworthy or responsible, those are not as easily separable as you’re indicating here. We might say someone is the cause of something—so to use the example I just gave, Rick is the cause of the store being robbed—but Rick is neither blameworthy nor responsible for it. He’s just, in a simple forensic sense, the cause of the store being robbed.

I think blameworthiness and creditworthiness—or responsibility—have to do with the freedom of the moral agent engaging in some kind of action.

Now, to reopen the brackets and get back to what Rick said about tricking my inner SartreAN—you said tricking, but you knew I’d make it dirty.

Devonya: What’s required to tickle your inner Sartrean?

Leigh: Not much for me, though. Let’s just be honest. But you’re right, Rick, that for Sartre, freedom is absolute. And therefore, responsibility is absolute in as much as responsibility requires freedom. If I am absolutely free, then I am also absolutely responsible.

That’s a longer conversation—which, by the way, we’ve also had on this podcast before—but Sartre’s basic argument is that there’s no case in which I am not responsible for what is.

There are starving children in the world right now. In fact, there are starving children in Memphis right now. I might want to say, “Look, children dying of starvation is way more important to me as a moral agent than recording a podcast about responsibility.”

But the fact of the matter is that I woke up today, and what I freely chose to do is prepare for and then sit down with the two of you to have this podcast recording about responsibility—not go seek out starving children in Memphis and try to help them.

If I say, “I’m not responsible for those children,” it requires me to claim that there are no other choices I could have made that might have ameliorated that wrong in the world. But obviously, there are other choices I could have made.

And in as much as I say, “This is a value I have—children should not die of starvation,” the fact of the matter is my actual actions today demonstrate that this conversation and this podcast are more important to me than addressing that wrong.

Devonya: I don’t quibble with your reading of Sartre—it’s absolutely spot on. I do, however, quibble with Sartre in terms of this idea of absolute freedom, and I like some of the ways Simone de Beauvoir approaches freedom, particularly how it can be constrained by one’s location within social and institutional structures.

Rick: Devonya, can you explain to Dave who Simone de Beauvoir is?

Devonya: Simone de Beauvoir is another French philosopher who was an interlocutor with Sartre. They were in a romantic relationship. Simone de Beauvoir saw herself primarily as a novelist, not a philosopher, but she is credited with ushering in much of feminist philosophy.

One of her central concerns was the idea of womanhood and addressing the conditions of women, specifically in the Western world. While her focus was largely on the lived experience of women in the West, she did expand beyond that. She examined how we can begin to talk about what freedom constitutes for women, how to understand their lived experiences, and how to empower women within these structures.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she explores the idea that our projects of freedom inevitably bump up against other people’s projects of freedom. This raises questions about how we negotiate these overlaps, particularly around issues of ethical responsibility.

Leigh: Rick’s asking you to give us a biography of Simone de Beauvoir might have cut off your point. Your point, I think, was to say that Beauvoir offers a correction, in some ways, to what you seem to suggest is an exaggeration of what Sartre calls absolute responsibility.

Devonya: Right, because Sartre’s concept depends on this idea of absolute freedom—that I can freely choose, or that my actions are an indication of me freely choosing what I see as meaningful in the world. This contrasts with the things I merely profess to find meaningful.

I take your earlier example about starving children in Memphis as a demonstration of this tension. You find that situation morally reprehensible, yet the choices you make don’t directly address it. That dissonance highlights how absolute freedom might not exist, particularly for certain social groups.

I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “As a Black woman philosopher in the United States, I am absolutely free.”

Leigh: Now that my inner Sartrean has been completely tickled, I just want to say that I, too, don’t wake up as a queer woman in the United States and think, “Oh, I am absolutely free.” I am constantly confronted with demonstrations of how I am not free, or at least not meaningfully free.

But here’s where I think it’s important to remember that when Sartre says “human beings are absolutely free,” he does not mean “we can do whatever we want” or that there are no restrictions on our actions. What he means is that there is no point at which we are absolutely unfree.

That is to say, as long as I have some choice—even if it’s a limited one—I am still free.

Rick: And now we’re going to have to give out the hotline number!

Leigh: Yeah, well, not to get too dark here, but I always have at least one choice: to check out entirely. That’s just a fact.

So, I am never completely without some choice. In that sense, my freedom is absolute—not in the sense that I can do whatever I want, but in the sense that there is no situation in which I am entirely unfree.

Devonya: That’s a great nuance, and I missed it.

—

Rick: Let me ask both of you this question because I’m a little confused myself. I think I would agree that, in contemporary standard English in the United States, when we use the word responsibility, we mean someone is—okay, I’ll say it—blameworthy or creditworthy for some action they performed or chose not to perform.

But I also think there are other senses in which we use the word responsibility that don’t include that. For example, a manager being responsible for employees or faculty being responsible for the curriculum.

I mean, there is a way to reduce that to blameworthiness—in other words, if the faculty does a bad job, we can blame them because they are responsible. But I’m not sure that’s what we always mean.

I also want to go back to something Devonya started with: the ability to respond. That might include the ability to respond to wrongdoings, but it might also include the ability to respond to others, whether or not I am the cause of their situation.

Devonya: Yeah, I agree with that. And maybe a dimension of being able to respond includes a notion of care—a concern for and an attending to. That’s what I mean by care. Even if I am not to blame for something, I still need to attend to it, and it still needs to be a concern for me.

Leigh: I might want to add that the sense of responsibility you’re using now, Rick, when you say, “I, as a professor, am responsible for the operations of my university or for my students,” or, “I, as a manager, am responsible for my employees,” I think that is a significantly different sense of responsibility.

It’s not entirely unrelated, of course. I think it still comes down to blameworthiness or creditworthiness. But it’s different in the sense that this kind of responsibility functions as a part of what I want to call meaningful world-building.

When I say I am responsible for my students, that doesn’t mean I can be blamed for everything my students do. But it does mean that, as a moral agent, what makes my moral agency meaningful is that I exist in a world in which, among other things, there are students for whom I am responsible.

Not just students I can respond to, but students I ought to respond to.

Rick: Okay, I think there are philosophers—DERRIDA would be one of them, and I think HEGEL would also be one of them—who would look at these two notions of responsibility and try to figure out, either (and this would be HEGEL’s point), what’s the truth of responsibility that undergirds both of them?

Or, in DERRIDA’s sense, is there a sense of absolute responsibility that, even if it doesn’t exist, is always present in any responsibility?

I think it’s not about blame, but maybe something like carrying a burden. For example, if I say I am responsible for something like structural racism in the United States, that doesn’t mean I caused it or that I’m to blame for it. It means I carry it as my burden.

If I’m responsible for robbing the convenience store in Leigh’s earlier example—not because of coercion but just because I decided to do it—that’s also my burden to carry. And I wonder if blame is actually the issue here. Leigh: I think this is a really important point. I also, just as a preface, want to point out that harm or benefit don’t always correlate with responsibility.

To use Rick’s earlier example, if a rock falls on my head, I’m harmed, but the rock is not responsible. Or, if I’m walking into a building and somebody opens the door in front of me, and it just so happens to stay open long enough for me to walk in, I’m benefited. But the other person is not necessarily credited with doing something beneficial.

So, I do think we have to separate benefit and harm from blameworthiness and creditworthiness. And again, I just want to suggest that the operative difference there is: was a decision made?

Devonya: Right, but if one makes a decision and harm is caused—even if they didn’t intend harm—they’re still blameworthy. Maybe that’s what you’re getting at.

Leigh: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. If one makes a decision, now we’re talking about credit and blame. If no decision is made, we’re not talking about credit and blame.

But let me go back to your earlier example of people saying, “Well, my ancestors didn’t own slaves, so I’m not to blame.” That person is still to blame for the perpetuation of structures that they benefit from.

It’s not the case that harm and benefit neatly map onto credit and blame. But if decisions are being made, it is the case that credit and blame map onto what we’re calling, I think, a responsibility for those decisions.

Devonya: What if I am not aware of the ways in which I am deciding these things? I think there are places where decisions are so embedded into our everyday actions that we’re not necessarily fully aware we’re making decisions.

Another dimension of that would be that things become so habitual that we no longer recognize them as decisions—or we feel that we are in conditions where we aren’t really deciding.

Leigh: Again, you’re tickling my inner Sartrean here. What SARTRE would say is that we also have to think about what we are aware of—or what we refuse to become aware of—as part of the decisions we make in our lives every day.

For example, somebody just got shot in Beijing. A store just got robbed in Manila. I don’t even know about it—so how could I possibly be responsible for it? Well, in the same way that you’re responsible for not knowing the things you don’t know.

In the same way that I could have gotten up today and said, “I’m going to feed hungry children instead of recording a podcast,” I also could have gotten up many days before today and said, “I’m going to educate myself about the conflict in Palestine,” or, “I’m going to educate myself about institutional racism.”

Those are decisions that I made, and I have either benefited from or been harmed by making—or not making—those decisions. The things that I don’t know don’t just exist in a vacuum where responsibility never applies.

Rick: Let me just say, from my perspective, I am worried—and I’m trying to figure out why I’m worried—about reducing responsibility, in a moral sense, to credit and blame.

This kind of calculus seems to me to not align with what we mean when we talk about the good and living the good life. Nor is it, I think, what we ought to mean when we talk about the good and living the good life.

If I put responsibility in the context of the good and living the good life, is there a sense of responsibility that isn’t just about blame and credit?

Let me put it another way. I think it is the case that most moral philosophy has little or nothing to do with making moral decisions.

I should say—I’m stealing this argument from CHRISTINE KORSGAARD. Well, not stealing it—I just gave her credit!

Devonya: You’re resourcing it.

Rick: Resourcing, yes. I’m using it to advance it in a different context. On her argument—and I think I agree with it—much of what moral philosophy is about is finding ways to give reasons to others for the things we’ve done.

Often, I think philosophers teach moral philosophy by saying, “Here’s virtue ethics, here’s KANT’s deontological ethics, here’s utilitarianism, here’s DE Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics. Now, here’s a problem—let’s work through it using each of these.”

But when I do something and you come to me and say, “Rick, what the hell?” I need to provide you with reasons. Those reasons might be something like, “The greatest good for the greatest number,” or, “It’s what leads to the good in the end,” or something similar.

None of that, I think, is really about credit and blameworthiness. It’s more about giving reasons.

Leigh: I disagree—but I could disagree with you less.

I agree with you that, ultimately, the issue in ethics is about how we exist in the world with others.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Nevertheless, I think how we exist in the world with others is inherently tied to credit and blame.

When you said, “I need to be able to make explanations to others about why I did a certain thing or how I came to decide to do a certain thing,” that explanation is a recognition that my actions are going to be credited to me—or I’m going to be blamed for them.

If I lived in a world all by myself, on a desert island, credit and blame would have no valence. And I think probably responsibility—at least moral responsibility—would have no valence either.

But because I don’t live on a desert island by myself, it is the case that, if I’m existing in a world with other people and I want to act ethically, then my actions are going to involve credit and blame.

Devonya: I want to quibble because I think there is something between or alongside credit and blame. I don’t want to displace credit and blame, but I do want to say that I find them to be limited dimensions for thinking about building an ethical and moral world—a world of people who are very different, who have diverse understandings of what the common good might constitute or what a particular group deserves or ought to receive.

We have diverse opinions about these things, and it strikes me that one is responsible for engaging in conversations about them. I think part of that is the responsibility of being a citizen. So, harm and benefit, I think, offer additional dimensions for this discussion about blameworthiness and creditworthiness.

Leigh: I don’t think anything I’ve said disagrees with that. I don’t think anything I’ve said suggests that we don’t actually disagree about what should be credited and what should be blamed.

And I’m not attributing this viewpoint to you, Devonya, or to you, Rick—but just to state it straightforwardly—my suspicion is that most critiques of any ethical theory, especially critiques that involve how a particular ethical theory assigns credit and blame or understands credit and blame or moral responsibility, are, at bottom, ways of avoiding responsibility.

Devonya: Right, and I think often we, as philosophers, create these moral philosophies that are not necessarily embedded in the world and then try to retrofit them to solve problems that we encounter—while ignoring a lot of other kinds of issues, like colonialism in its settler and imperial forms.

We want to roll back these applications, and we want to avoid credit or blameworthiness within the theory. Now, I’m not saying I want to avoid credit or blameworthiness—I’m saying the exact opposite of that. What I’m saying is that the theoretical position often operates around a certain kind of blame or credit.

And that fosters the kind of escapism from credit or blame that you were describing.

Rick: Leigh, you said most critiques of moral theories are ways of escaping responsibility, and I thought Devonya was playing out what that position looks like.

Devonya: Yes.

Rick: The way of escaping responsibility.

Leigh: That was my aim. As long as I keep getting to credit and blame people, I’m cool.

Rick: What I’m struggling with right now—and I don’t know if I have an answer—is that I’m okay with saying ethics is about holding people to account, but I’m not happy with saying it’s about blame and credit.

For the very simple reason that I want to know: why are you blaming, and why are you giving credit? It seems to me that the reason one wants to blame or give credit is for some other good. And I think that is what we should talk about as ethics—not the credit and blame.

—-

Leigh: At the end of the last section, Rick said that he’s really worried about the ends to which people use credit and blame for other projects or other kinds of discussions about responsibility.

Although I think that’s a really interesting question, I also think that is what philosophers would call a metaethical question. And that’s not what we’re doing here—we’re not doing metaethics; we’re doing ethics.

So, if it’s okay with both of you, I’d like to shift the conversation from what we’ve been talking about—which has, for the most part, focused on individual responsibility—to something like collective responsibility.

I think collective responsibility is a really difficult concept to wrap our heads around, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult as the world becomes more interconnected, more dependent on one another, and either more cooperative or non-cooperative—however you want to phrase it.

So, is there such a thing as collective responsibility, morally speaking? And if so, what is it?

Rick: Well, this goes back to why I think my point at the end of the last section was not a metaethical point but, in fact, the central ethical point. Namely, if ethics is about living together well, then I think it’s my responsibility to contribute to and work toward that “living together well.”

If that means dealing with the climate catastrophe, then it’s my responsibility.

Leigh: I agree with you, and I think this, in many ways, parallels another structural problem that Devonya brought up earlier: systemic racism.

If it is the case that I, as a white person in the United States, am benefiting from systemic racism, I can’t say that I’m not responsible or that I don’t have some responsibility for the perpetuation of that system. As SARTRE says, “If I’m not against the war, then I’m for the war.” That’s the long and short of it.

So I agree with you that we do have to take responsibility for things that we may not be— as I said earlier—causally or forensically responsible for.

That said, one of the things that’s very difficult about convincing people of the importance of confronting their own responsibility for ameliorating, as much as possible, the effects of climate change is that we all know—even collectively, as citizens or moral agents—we’re not the ones doing the most damage.

If all of us decided to buy electric cars, put solar panels on our roofs, and drink out of paper straws, it still wouldn’t meaningfully ameliorate the damage being done by airlines, AI systems, large corporations, and so on.

So one of the problems we face now is that when we talk about collective responsibility for addressing climate change, a lot of people become fatalistic. They think, “What’s the point? No matter how much I do, it’s not going to make a meaningful difference.”

Now, does that have anything to do with our responsibility? I would still say no. But it does have to do with how individuals understand their responsibility.

Devonya: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But it’s also important to point out that there are non-Western moral theories that already have collectivity built into them.

Take Ubuntu philosophy, for example—shorthanded as “I am because we are, and we are because I am.” Individuality is tied to collectivity, and collectivity is tied to its individuals.

I lean into that because it talks about how I am responsible, how my behavior is accountable. And maybe that’s another way to frame a dimension of responsibility: I have to take account of what I’m doing.

Even if I can’t solve the greater problem, I can have an aspirational consciousness about altering the climate. And maybe I have a particular relationship to structures and systems that give me a different orientation toward my duties to the world.

Rick: That is so wonderfully put, and it helps me clarify two things about what I’ve been worried about in our discussion of responsibility in relation to the individual—and why I think collective responsibility is important.

The first issue you mentioned, Devonya, has to do—if I flip it—with the isolated, atomic individual that’s implicit in notions of blame and credit. If I say that this isolated individual is actually a fiction, then I can adopt a view of the individual that aligns more with what you were describing from the Ubuntu tradition.

The second thing you said ties directly to my worry about credit and blame. You used the word aspirational.

A lot of our talk about responsibility seems to focus on such a negative horizon. But what if we framed ethics as being about how the world ought to be? In that case, it’s about a horizon of hope and working to make good on that ought, rather than focusing solely on the way the world actually is.

In this sense, I think we could start to make good sense of saying, “I am responsible for systemic racism, for patriarchy, for the climate catastrophe.” Not in a way that has to do with accounting for credit or blame, but in a way that involves taking up, as my cause, the project of making the world as it ought to be.

Leigh: Yeah, it’s that last part that I think is really important. One of the difficulties in incorporating theories that emphasize collective responsibility, like Ubuntu, is that these theories were originally formulated in situations that are dramatically different from the world we live in now.

How do I take collective responsibility in a world where my collectives aren’t the ones that are most operative? Today, the most operative collectives in the world are corporations, state actors, or even non-state actors.

How do I take responsibility for that?

Here’s where I think what Rick just said becomes crucial. It’s not about doing a daily ledger of what I’m responsible for or not responsible for—my “credit and blame ledger.” Instead, it’s about asking: Given my understanding of how things are operating, what can I do to create a better world?

That’s where we inevitably have to shift away from thinking about collective responsibility solely in terms of credit and blame.

And yes, I’m a hundred percent aware that I’m backtracking on what I said earlier. But collective responsibility can’t just be about credit and blame—it also has to be about what is to be done, ultimately.

That’s where we find a model for both formulating the kinds of moral agents we need in the world we live in and thinking about how we might collectively decide.

For me, going all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, responsibility is about situations in which a decision has to be made. And collective decisions have to be made, just like individual decisions.

Devonya: So, we’ve got to work out how we are going to promote the common good. I’m certain I’ll have differences in my viewpoint about what constitutes things that bring us closer to a common good and things that move us away from it.

I really like this idea of the common good, which I borrow from Catholic social teaching. It’s the notion that we aspire toward a good, and we need a good in common. But it’s not given—we have to work out how we’re going to arrive at that aspirational goal. What kind of target, so to speak, are we erecting? That’s something we must come up with collectively.

Leigh: I just want to point out something for the sake of listeners that is commonly discussed in philosophical circles but may not be obvious to everyone: when Devonya talks about what we are going to do—the capital “W” We, the royal We, or what we collectively are going to do—it’s more or less taken as a given in academic philosophy now that there is no universal We, capital W.

By that, I mean our individual identities intersect with many communities. Often, those communities’ interests and risks conflict, even within one individual.

For example, Rick is a white, male, professional, educated philosopher. I am a queer, white woman, probably lower class than Rick—in both senses of the word “class,” let me just say—and Devonya is a Black woman, an educated professional. We have so many overlapping identity points in our individual lives, and all of our individual identities are intersectional.

Devonya: Intersexual.

Leigh: Intersexual!

Devonya: I like that.

Rick: Sorry, that’s how I identify.

Leigh: Maybe that too, but I meant to say intersectional. And that means our community investments are also intersectional.

So, when we say that we need to act toward some common goal—and I feel like I’ve heard this repeatedly in what you’ve been saying, Devonya—that goal is always going to require conflictual negotiations. Right?

Devonya: Right. Conflict-laden negotiations.

Leigh: Precisely. It’s not as easy as just saying what the collective good is.

Rick: I agree wholeheartedly, but it seems to me there are two senses in which a collective is a We.

One is the sense you’ve been talking about, Leigh, where I belong to multiple communities and therefore experience many different Wes. But then there are also ways that I can’t get out of those Wes—no matter how much I might want to.

Going back to what I said earlier, this is what upset me when people were using the hashtag “#NotMyPresident.” I thought, “It doesn’t work that way.” You don’t get to say that. Like it or not, we are a We.

I might wish we weren’t, but here we are. And that’s a struggle within the We to try to work out—not so well right now—what the good in common is, the common good.

Then, there are other ways I am part of a collective—both because I want to be and because our striving for some shared good is what makes us a community.

This is a point ARISTOTLE makes in the Nicomachean Ethics: the best kind of friendship is when I am a friend with someone because we are both friends of the good. We’re a community because we both believe this is a good that ought to be pursued.

We want to work together to create the world we want to live in because that’s how the world ought to be. That’s what constitutes the community.

But I also want to reemphasize Devonya’s point about the way this process is worked out. And I don’t mean this in a violent or negative way, but it’s worked out through contestation—through working together.

Devonya: I raise this because, at this point in history, there are so many contestations.

I’ll blame it on social media—though I know that’s a fraught place to lay blame and not credit—but I think we are not having collective conversations. Maybe this leans into the distinction between collective responsibility and political responsibility. I would venture to say that they overlap.

My commitments to justice have a lot to do with the communities I occupy. That, in turn, shapes my political engagements—namely, my engagements within the context of the U.S. democratic structure, for lack of a better description.

Leigh: If I could return for a second to Ubuntu philosophy, which Devonya mentioned earlier, this is an African ontological structure that, as Devonya rightly stated, posits: “I am through other people. I am through the We.”

This philosophy was probably made most famous in the early 1990s during the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

For those unfamiliar with this history, South Africa, until 1990, was a legally apartheid state. The country transitioned to a multiracial democracy, and the TRC was the body charged with making this transition—hopefully, peacefully.

One of the things the TRC acknowledged in its reports was that, in order for the country to move forward after decades of disappearances, violence, and structural and individual atrocities, they had to find a way to collectively take responsibility for what had happened.

Now, this might sound obscene to many people. Of course, not everyone was responsible for apartheid—there were clear perpetrators and clear victims.

Nevertheless, the TRC, basing its work on Ubuntu philosophy, argued that, for the nation to move forward, they had to collectively take responsibility for where they were and what they had become.

How did this work? People were given the opportunity to confess—to report the truth of what they had done, what they were involved in, or what they knew about. This contributed to a collective public record—a collectively true historical record of what had happened.

The TRC understood that, without this record, without this common responsibility, without a shared understanding of the nation’s history, any future would be impossible.

Famously, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the commissioners, said, “There is no future without forgiveness.”

Now, putting aside the forgiveness part, the point was: there is no future without us all taking responsibility.

This is a very hard thing to understand if you’re on the receiving end of injustice. Many people have criticized the TRC for this, and I think those criticisms are valid and important.

And yet, there would be no modern South Africa if this had not been done. They made the conscientious decision to understand the collective as responsible for the maintenance and survival of the collective.

Devonya: You just reminded me of a kind of contrast to that. I’ve been streaming a lot of old Star Trek episodes, and when you said “the collective,” I immediately thought, “Oh, the Borg.” Somebody needs to lay off the phony Negronis. Cut her off, bartender.

So, the Borg is a collective that is interested in a shared good—the perfection of their collective. But they are blameworthy because part of how they pursue this good is by assimilating people with technology, altering them to follow this central mission. The individuals don’t have a choice in it.

Rick: Resistance is futile.

Devonya: Yes. I want to contrast that with the kind of responsibility Leigh is talking about.

Leigh: So, I’m not familiar with this Star Trek reference, but it sounds to me like one important difference between the Borg and what the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was doing is that the TRC wasn’t assuming there was already a shared good.

They were assuming that what it means to take collective responsibility is to say that—going back to the earlier reference Rick made about responsibility for a group, like responsibility for students or a community, or responsibility as a manager for employees—taking responsibility involves the ongoing definition of what the collective good is.

That, I think, is ultimately the foundation of what we mean by collective responsibility.

Devonya: Yes, and I like that as a contrast to the fictional Borg. The Borg is a collective. It’s a community. Its members have a designation and an obligation to the larger community. But it is not engaging in political responsibility or collective response.

Rick: Someday, Devonya, you and I are going to have to start a side podcast, because I could not possibly disagree more with your claim that the individuals in the Borg have an identity.

Devonya: In the Borg? I mean, an identity in the sense of having a designated difference—not an identity in the broader sense of selfhood, flourishing, or autonomy about who they are.

Leigh: I’m just going to sit over here and eat my clementines while you two discuss this.

Devonya: Fine, I’ll switch the term identity with designation. They have a designation.

Rick: Good, good.

Rick: Can I ask the two of you something? Is Donald Trump your president? Are you responsible for him being president?

Leigh: First of all, fuck you. Second of all, no.

But seriously, I’ve been very frustrated watching the confirmation hearings of Donald Trump’s proposed cabinet. When they’re asked straightforwardly, “Did Donald Trump lose his election?” the nominees respond with, “Well, Joe Biden is the president,” effectively avoiding the question.

So part of me wants to say, “Well, Donald Trump is the president,” as a statement of fact—but that’s not an answer to your question.

I will say, though, that I do think I am responsible for Donald Trump being president in the sense that SARTRE describes: there are literally infinite numbers of choices I could have made over the last 20 years that might have made this outcome less likely.

So yes, I’m responsible. I think the communities I love and am committed to are also responsible. And at the top of that list is the Democratic National Party.

Devonya: Okay, heavy sigh. Joe Biden was the president, and Donald Trump is the current president.

Part of my issue here is our political structure: the way we elect presidents and the way we count—or fail to count—people’s participation.

Let’s talk about who is disenfranchised. It’s not unlike the disenfranchisement of formerly enslaved people. We have incarcerated people who cannot vote but are counted as part of the population that contributes to congressional representation.

We have districts that are gerrymandered to give certain parties an advantage. And our options are largely limited to two parties.

So I struggle a lot with this. I would say I am responsible because I have a concern for this, and I am accountable for taking action to create the world I aspire to live in—and, most importantly, the world I want my children and loved ones, both present and future, to inhabit.

Rick: I would combine both of your points.

In that very abstract sense—where I’m responsible for the pickpocket in Indianapolis right now—I’m responsible for Donald Trump being president.

But what I like about your point, Devonya, is that I am responsible in the sense that he is my president. And that responsibility means taking responsibility for the communities I wish I weren’t a part of and the communities I hope to be a better part of—where we can support one another in working toward the world as it ought to be.

In that sense, I don’t know if I am responsible. But I will take up responsibility.

Leigh: You are responsible. And although this isn’t a contest, let me just say, Devonya, you’re probably the least responsible of all of us. Black women have been the one group actually doing the work to ensure that this reality didn’t become reality.

Rick: That’s nicely said, Leigh, because I think there’s something a little bit—let me just say wrong. I was going to say slimy, but let me just say wrong—about me going on Twitter and throwing up a hashtag like #NotAllMen, as if by declaring myself different, I am now absolved of responsibility.

Devonya: Yeah.

Rick: And I think “Not My President” is a bit like that.

Devonya: This history is just a repetition in the present. It is not new that we exist in a politically contentious world.

I hear a lot of people bemoaning Trump, saying, “Oh, we’ve become so contentious.” And from my perspective, the political state in the U.S. has always been a contentious one—at least for certain social groups.

In this present moment, I think people who have felt enfranchised are now finding themselves experiencing disenfranchisement. And therefore, their lived experience of contention is very different.

Leigh: Well, unfortunately, our bartender is not taking responsibility for this conversation and is telling us we have to leave.

We’ve got to get out of here, but this has been a really fantastic conversation. Thank you both so much, and I’ll catch you next time