Responsibility, but not Blame

I was reading this article this morning, and the following passage caught my attention:

"When Mr. Obama presents his first State of the Union address on Wednesday evening, aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame, for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago."

What is the distinction between "accepting responsibility" and "accepting blame" that White House aides are relying on here? Is this just political wordplay or can we make something substantive out of it?

Comments

[Tamler Sommers]

I saw that too. Here's my take:

Responsibility: 'Take-charge' responsibility (as Waller calls it). "This is my mess, and it's my responsibility to clean it up. I thought I could do a little faster but it's a bigger mess than I imagined."

Blame: Desert entailing responsibility. "It's not my FAULT that we're in this mess. You can thank George W. Bush and AIG for that. Nor is it my fault that I misjudged the extent of the mess. It's an enormous complex cluster you know what."

[Kip]

Looks like John Fischer is advising the Obama administration.

[Andrei Buckareff]

Here's a pretty standard example most of you are familiar with (there's a point to this). You're a bank teller. A robber sticks a gun in your face and tells you to give her all the money you can stuff in the sack she hands you. You do so. She successfully escapes from the crime scene.

Suppose that but for your cooperating with the robber, she would have been unsuccessful. Qua cooperating agent you share some responsibility for her successful heist. But you are not blameworthy for your actions. You acted under duress.

I'm guessing that Obama is thinking of himself as not unlike the bank teller with respect to some recent choices he has made. (Does that make the Republicans, DLC Democrats, and a certain independent Senator from Connecticut like the bank robbers?)

[Neal Tognazzini]

So, is it like this?

I try to take a plate from the top shelf of a high cupboard but I don't realize that there's a fragile bowl sitting on top of the plate. As I pull the plate down, the bowl falls onto the floor and shatters. I'm causally responsible for the fact that the bowl shattered, but since I didn't know it was there (and couldn't have been expected to know), you can't be mad at me.

Maybe this would work if what he was accepting responsibility for was the current state of the economy or something like that -- but the article says he's accepting responsibility for *failing to deliver swiftly on promised changes*. That seems to complicate things.

[John Fischer]

Kip: I take neither responsibility nor blame for Obama.

I agree, Neal: it is sort of odd, when you try to interpret political statements such as this. Actually, I think that over the years, there has developed a "politician's" usage of "taking responsibility". When a political says, "I take responsibility", he or she typically means something like: that's in the job-portfolio, and it is reasonable to expect me to do my best to do the thing in question." Typically they go on to say that something essentially out of their control went wrong, or that they'll fix the problem next time, or... Typically, the FUNCTION of the statement by a politician, "I take responsibility," is to seek to avoid or deflect or diminish any bad consequences (blame).

Actually, and I might be wrong about this, I think Bill Clinton once advised Jesse Jackson about how to deal with the fallout from extramarital affairs discovered by the press. I think Clinton told Jackson that the best way to avoid blame is to take responsibility (or something like that).

[Chris Franklin]

What John said strikes me as very plausible: Its called doublespeak.

[Eddy Nahmias]

I agree with much of what has been said, but maybe a charitable way of reading the claim is with these additions: "... he would accept *ultimate* responsibility *(and take future responsibility)*, though not necessarily *all the* blame, for failing to deliver swiftly..."

And not "ultimate" as we use it but as in "final". That is, Obama is ultimately in charge (the buck stops there) so mistakes by his people are his responsibility (but he doesn't bear all the blame) and difficulties beyond his control and anyone's expectations are his responsibility (job) to deal with (though he doesn't bear much of the blame for most of them), and he's the top cog in a screwed-up system but it's not really his fault the congressional system is so screwed-up but he is to blame for not managing it better... and so on. Politics is more, shall we say, nuanced than philosophy?

[Zac Cogley]

I'm inclined to think it's one of (or perhaps all) of the sorts of distinctions Tamler, Andrei, Neal and John have proposed, with a complicating factor being that in order for Obama to deliver on promised changes he has to work with 600+ other people.

It's not just that there was a bowl on top of the plate, it's that the reason the bowl was even there had to do with the actions of an enormous group of people and when we tried to get the plate down we were working with several hundred as well. Of course, in hindsight it's easy to say that we should have used a ladder, but given our epistemic situation at the time (which also depended on the actions of hundreds) it wasn't reasonable to expect the bowl to be there.

This is more speculative, but I'm also reminded a bit of the problem in political theory called the "problem of dirty hands." I took a class in graduate school that enrolled both philosophers and political scientists on the problem and was struck by what seemed to me to be very different conceptual frameworks for thinking through the examples. The philosophers got really frustrated with the poly sci folks and vice versa. So it's possible that Obama and his writers are just not using words like "responsible," "blame," and "wrong" in quite the sense that we are. See here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/
for several of the competing takes on the problem, many of which are inconsistent.

We need a contact in the administration! (for many reasons)

[R. Clarke]

Setting aside what the president might have meant, one might accept responsibility while not accepting blame if (as one sees it) one didn't act badly, even if what one did had bad results.

[Joshua Shepherd]

Prof. Fischer's take seems right. It seems there is a conversational implicature according to which 'I take responsibility' in political contexts means something like 'I'm aware of the problem, I wish it hadn't happened, I don't want to argue about whether it was my fault, so I magnanimously take responsibility and in so doing render your argument that it IS my fault bad form.'

For my part, as a graduate student I accept responsibility for all the right or wrong things I might say, though I accept none of the praise or blame.

[John Fischer]

Nevertheless, Joshua, you DO deserve praise for your post!

[Anadinboy]

i dont see how the two can be so fully separated . i think 'blame' is just an informal slang term, for what naturally happens when we identify the person responisble for the mess-up.

[Adam Lerner]

With regard to healthcare: "Still, this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering what's in it for them."

...Seems like Obama does think accepting responsibility entails accepting blame, or at least that it wouldn't be politically expedient to separate the two in this situation. I think it'd be a really fascinating study to look at a number of political speeches through time and see in what types of scenarios politicians tend to use responsibility in a way that entails blame and when they don't, or, more generally, when they invoke the language of blame and responsibility at all and when they don't... Perhaps we could start with Lincoln's Second Inaugural: "On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it... and the war came.... let us judge not, that we be not judged...The Almighty has His own purposes...in the providence of God... With malice toward none; with charity for all..."

[Clayton Littlejohn]

Isn't there a prospective use of responsibility that comes to something like obligation? I can't be blamed for my child being sick, but it's my responsibility to do something about it. Sounds good to me. Seems pretty similar to, "I can't be blamed for Bush's messes but it's my responsibility to do something about them".

[Eric]

I think it's something like this:
(R) To determine responsibility for X is to know where (with whom) to stop in explaining how X came about.
(B) To assign blame for X is to combine (R) with a further judgment that whoever is responsible for X should have done otherwise.

Here are two cases:
Case A: Rupert is run over by a car. It is determined that the car was being driven by a baby who had shifted the car into neutral so that it rolled down a hill and struck Rupert.
Case B: Rupert is struck by a car driven by a vengeful colleague envious of his recent success in publishing a paper in a prestigious journal.

[Chris Franklin]

Clayton,

But Obama's aid said he is accepting responsibility "for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago." This would suggest the his using responsibility in a retrospective way. And the responsibility Obama is accepting is his own failure, not Bush's.

[John Fischer]

Apart from the niceties and philosophical issues, I would like to see George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and anyone in that crowd (Rumsfeld?) show even an inkling of responsibility for the horrible messes they inflicted on our nation and the world. We can talk about subtle points about Obama all we want, but he is trying to deal with horrible messes that were left by his predecessors, who, as far as I can tell, don't take real responsibility for doing anything wrong.

[Clayton]

"But Obama's aid said he is accepting responsibility "for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago."

Okay, but now you're using the facts of the case. That seems rather unfair.

[Cihan]

OK, I'll give you the distinction between blameworthiness and moral responsibility. (This is the distinction Fischer falls back on in his reply to Pereboom's 4 case argument.) It seems plausible that MR is necessary for B and B is sufficient for MR. Similarly for praiseworthiness.

But in that case, consider this. Is it plausible that blameworthiness and (in)determinism are incompatible but responsibility and (in)determinism are compatible? And further suppose I subscribed to this view. Would I be a compatibilist? I don't think so. This was why the reply to the 4 case argument in 'My Way' was so disappointing. :-(

I am skeptical that such a, in Werking's words, 'razor thin' distinction makes sense. But even if there really was such a distinction, I don't think it would do the work Fischer (and maybe others) wants it to do.

I think freedom without blameworthiness/praiseworthiness is not the real thing.

[Kip]

Cihan:

My original comment here (about Fischer advising Obama) was reference to the 4-case argument.

But maybe "razor thin" was too harsh!

[Anadinboy]

Obama is responsible for making promises he couldnt deliver on. He is not to blame for that, simpley because he was making impossible promises in the first place. By avioding blame in this way, he leaves himself wide open to charges of acting in bad faith all along.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Now Tony Blair has said, regarding his decision to join Bush in the Iraq invasion, that he "felt responsibility, but not regret for removing Saddam Hussein." Not quite as awkward as the Obama quote, but why say you feel responsibility, rather than take responsibility, if you also say, as he does of the decision he took, that he would "frankly would take [it] again"?

[John Alexander]

I think it is a matter of recognizing a distinction between being responsible for x and being responsible for the outcome from x. As President he assumes responsibility for the outcomes from x (Clayton's sense of obligation, I think) but is not responsible for being in the x he inherits from previous Presidents. He cannot be blamed for being in x if x is the result of others' action, but he can be blamed for not appropriately removing x if he is obligated to effectively remove x.