Taking responsibility seriously

Jung

pp. 147-165

in: Kevin Thompson, Lester Embree (eds), Phenomenology of the political, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

The concept of responsibility lives in the shadow of the hagiographic life of rights in the modern West.¹ Western modernity has privileged rights while handcuffing and marginalizing responsibility. Ours, in particular, is the land of rights talk, and our political and legal thought has been enslaved to and by it. As Amy Gutmann recently points out, "most prominent political philosophers are now rights theorists."² Today rights talk has invaded and colonized even the nonhuman world of nature: we speak of the "rights of nature" and "animal rights" as well as "civil rights" and "human rights." We are indeed possessed and compressed by rights talk. So-called "retreat" from or the "reclamation" of responsibility is a phantom expression because responsibility has never assumed conceptual prominence or strategic equity with rights in Western modernity.