Joseph Raz on responsibility and secure competence

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last two chapters of his book ‘From Normativity to Responsibility’, Joseph Raz developed, in outline, an intriguing account of responsibility, which is based on what he called the Rational Functioning Principle and on the idea of a domain of secure competence. With these two ideas, Raz argued, we could best delimit the scope of ‘responsibility’ in the sense of something ‘being to one’s credit or discredit as a rational agent’. In the following, I will argue that, while identifying some crucial aspects of our being agents ‘in the world’, Raz’s account does not fully capture the extent of the kind of responsibility he was interested in. In particular, unintentional failures that are due to the malfunctioning of capacities which are too unreliable to count as secure competences may well fall within the scope of responsibility thus understood. I will suggest Raz’s account should be supplemented by considerations drawn from ‘quality of will’ approaches, which can (inter alia) deal better with such cases.