Chapter 3: Why Responsibility and Information Systems?

In this chapter we want to show why it makes sense to use the concept of responsibility with respect to the business use of information technology. There are three parts to the argument. At first, we will demonstrate that the development of the moral idea of responsibility is closely linked to modern developments in our societies . Many of these developments have to do with technology and information technology being the latest step in this direction. We will then continue to show that there are several structural similarities between responsibility and business on the one hand and information technology on the other hand. In a last step we will show that this theoretical setting is fruitful because it can rely on a rich background of ethical theories from different fields and perspectives. Before we can do so, however, the next step will have to be a first analysis of the term responsibility.

A TENTATIVE DEFINITION OF RESPONSIBILITY

The following paragraphs have the purpose of conveying a rough idea of what the term responsibility is supposed to denote in this book. They will point out the most important meanings and components without getting too deep into a discussion of contents and problems. These discussions will be the subject of a detailed analysis in the next chapter. The purpose of this tentative definition is simply to give the reader a feeling for the term that will be required to understand why it is a sound idea to use the concept of responsibility in a discussion of business information technology.

The first difficulty when discussing responsibility is that the word is widely used and often denotes different, if not contradictory, facts and relationships. There are scholars who talk of an inflation of the use of the term (i.e., Homann, 1998, p. IX). Others point out that the clarity of the notion decreases with the frequency of its use (i.e., Etchegoyen, 1999, p. 44). If we believe what we hear, then there is little doubt that we live in a time of responsibility. Even terrorists enjoy accepting responsibility for their deeds. At the same time there is an inverse relationship between the readiness of accepting responsibility and the probability of consequences (Ilting, 1994, p. 176). As an illustration of the lack of clarity of the meaning of responsibility, let us look at a short story of a drunken sea captain that originates from H.L.A. Hart (1968, p. 211):

As captain of the ship, X was responsible for the safety of his passengers and crew. But on his last voyage he got drunk every night and was responsible for the loss of the ship with all aboard. It was rumoured that he was insane, but the doctors considered that he was responsible for his actions. Throughout the voyage he behaved quite irresponsibly, and various incidents in his career showed that he was not a responsible person. He always maintained that the exceptional winter storms were responsible for the loss of the ship, but in the legal proceedings brought against him, he was found criminally responsible for his negligent conduct, and in separate civil proceedings he was held legally responsible for the loss of life and property. He is still alive and he is morally responsible for the deaths of many women and children (Hart, 211).

The first thing we can state is that responsibility can have different meanings. It can stand for causality , for ethics, for morality, and for more idiosyncratic facts and relationships. We believe ”and will demonstrate this in the following chapter ”that responsibility is first and foremost a social construct aiming at ascription or imputation. Important dimensions of this ascription are the subject and the object. The object is ascribed to the subject. Thus, the subject is the answer to the question, Who is responsible? , and the object answers, What is the subject responsible for? This is true for all instances of responsibility. In the short story quoted above, the loss of the ship is ascribed to the storm and the loss of lives to the captain. There are different sorts of responsibility such as legal, moral, or role responsibility, but in any of these cases, ascription plays a central part.

Our next thesis concerning responsibility is that it is always a moral notion. We have already seen the complexity of the concepts of ethics and morality, but we can distil from them that they are used to denote facts and processes that affect the way we live or want to live in a fundamental way. Morality plays a role when peaceful coexistence or personal vulnerability come into play. All different sorts of responsibility affect in some way or another some fact of moral importance and are therefore morally relevant. An obvious example is legal responsibility that generally has moral consequences.

There are quite a few of other dimensions and determinants of responsibility that will be discussed in the next chapter. Nevertheless we will need to present some advanced conclusion of the discussion of responsibility in order to explain why responsibility is a term that can be applied fruitfully to information systems. First of all, the social construct of responsibility depends on communication. It is a means to transport contents of ethics and morality, but unlike most traditional moralities (in the German tradition s sense of the word), it does not give clear directions but is open and leads to unpredictable outcomes . It is by principle a teleological concept in that it aims at the good life and takes consequences of actions into account when giving moral judgment. At the same time it allows the inclusion of deontological ethical thoughts. Furthermore, the consequentialist side of responsibility seems to promise an affinity to action. When we speak of responsibility, this implies that something is going to happen, some concrete measures will appear, that sanctions can be imposed.

With this short introduction to responsibility, which the reader will have to accept for the time being, we can now explain why responsibility has attained the level of importance that it now holds, and we can also clarify why it has a close affiliation to business information technology.