Responsibility: Individual

Abstract

“Responsibility” is quite a common word in today’s daily life being commonly understood as accountability for one’s own actions. This is also its most ancient and general meaning, only formally defined in the contemporary age, by law, and therefore embracing a legal dimension that still prevails.

It was just recently that the word “responsibility” gained a more precise moral dimension in the two different philosophical approaches of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hans Jonas. By focusing directly on responsibility, these philosophers widened its conceptual horizon from the “did” (primarily legal) to the “ought to be done” (mainly moral). Both perspectives on responsibility enter the realm of bioethics, specifically considered either as environmental ethics (responsibility having more of a social nature and being less controversial) or biomedical ethics (responsibility having more of an individual nature and being more controversial). “Individual responsibility” is currently recognized, together with “autonomy,” as one of the principles of The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO (2005) Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/bioethics/bioethics-and-human-rights/. Last date of access 22 Oct 2015).

This entry starts by presenting an etymological and conceptual definition of “responsibility,” within a historical and philosophical framework, and proceeds by discussing some different kinds of highly controversial situations arising today in the biomedical field and challenging the boundaries of individual responsibility.