Responsibility

Responsibility is the condition of being answerable for one’s actions, duties, or their consequences. It can arise from personal choices, social roles, laws, or relationships.

Moral agency: The capacity to make choices that can be evaluated as morally right or wrong. Responsibility for conduct presupposes some capacity to choose and act.
Attribution: The process of assigning an action, outcome, or quality to a person or cause. Responsibility begins when conduct or consequences are attributed to an agent.
Free will: The capacity of agents to make choices that are not wholly determined by prior conditions. Debates about responsibility often turn on whether agents could have acted otherwise.
Criminal responsibility: Legal answerability for conduct that satisfies the elements of a criminal offense. It connects responsibility to punishment and the legal tests of guilt.
Retributive justice: A theory of justice that treats punishment as a deserved response to wrongdoing. It links established responsibility to the claim that wrongdoers deserve punishment.
Accountability: The requirement to explain conduct and face evaluation or consequences for it. It is the public and institutional form of being answerable.
Negligence: A failure to exercise the care that a reasonable person would use in similar circumstances. It grounds responsibility in unreasonable carelessness rather than deliberate harm.
Determinism: The view that events, including human actions, are fixed by prior conditions and laws of nature. If actions are determined, the basis for moral responsibility becomes contested.
Corporate social responsibility: A company’s consideration of its social and environmental effects alongside its economic activity. It extends answerability from individual decisions to organizational impacts.
Restorative justice: An approach to justice focused on repairing harm through participation by affected people. It treats taking responsibility as a route to repair rather than punishment alone.

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