An Integrated View of the Technicity of Action and the Question of Responsibility

Abstract

What is wisdom in practice (phronesis)? What does it mean to act responsibly? These questions concern us practically as we seek the best courses of action, but also as onlookers at what others do, or even as theoreticians. Often these questions accompany people silently throughout their lives; sometimes they boil up, precipitating an existential crisis. To varying degrees these questions are part of the constitutive ambiguities of action. Action is one with of the flow of life, but can, to some degree, be planned. Capabilities enable us to do things, but they confront us in a series of incapabilities. Instruments augment our ability to intervene in the world, but also increase the impact of unintended consequences. Ethical considerations inform our action, but acting in accordance with these values generates secondary effects that may contradict the initial values. Hence, efficacy is bound to ambiguity, and this does not leave us indifferent. In this book, I have not tried to dispel these perplexities of action – instead, I have attempted to grapple with them as part of the meaning of human action. Hermeneutics, in combination with insights from the social sciences, has helped me to do so, as I restricted my view to one dimension of action: its technicity. If there is something like prudent or responsible action, the preceding chapters have gone some way toward clarifying what constitutes the practical pursuit of it, while still leaving aside the question of the ethical values that should rightfully inform our action. Proceeding in this way, I have remained true to two significant lessons that can be learned from Paul Ricœur. The first is that the moment of distantiation from action allows us to examine it as meaningful, while assuming a spectator’s perspective. Thus, the more interpretative means of hermeneutics and the explanatory means of social theory1 enhance our understanding of action – explaining more helps us to understand better, according to Ricœur’s formula. But this is the case only because of what the second lesson teaches us: people