Responsibility for the Future

Abstract

Prospective ascription of responsibility is hypothetical, commonly noting or setting conditions for critical judgment or liability if some event occurs or fails to occur, thus determining vulnerability to retrospective judgments. Prospective liabilities can be classified by source, by type or degree (if any) of accompanying control, and by structure or stages. But not all prospective responsibility can be understood in terms of liability. Actual or de facto control over X and/or responsibility for Y (persons, animals, inanimate things, etc.), though they may involve prospective liabilities, may not be responsibilities to any person in particular. Such responsibilities may be called responsibilities in rem and distinguished from those assignable to persons (responsibilities in personam). Though prospective responsibility judgments often provide the most important grounds for retrospective judgments, if the concern is with the meaning of responsibility judgments, retrospective responsibility judgments are more basic. For, while we can understand retrospective judgments even though we know nothing of prospective ones, the opposite is not true 1. Prospective and Retrospective Judgments esponsibility is sometimes ascribed before the fact by persons whose eyes are on the future, and sometimes after the fact by critics and judges looking to the past. Prospective ascriptions of responsibility are hypothetical pronouncements about the future, often to the effect that if some event occurs (or fails to occur), the person now judged responsible for it will then be the proper subject of certain other judgments-for example, those ascribing credit or blame, or liability to punishment or reward. Those further judgments will, of course, be made retrospectively, for they will be about an event that has already occurred or failed to occur. Thus, if George is the one who is responsible for seeing to it that X happens, and then X fails to happen,