Private Law and Private Narratives

Abstract

Responsibility and Fault collects Tony Honore's recent essays about the familiar form of responsibility that he calls 'outcome responsibility', the kind of re sponsibility that is invoked when an agent is held responsible for some outcome to which he or she has contributed. Outcome responsibility is a familiar and pervasive feature of human life-persons think of themselves, and of each other, in terms of the impact that they have in the world. It is difficult to imagine what human life would be like without it. Our conception of interpersonal interaction is shaped by it, as is our autobiographical conception of ourselves as persons. I apologize to you if I jostle you in the corridor, because the dropping of your pile of papers is the result of my doing. In the quiet of my study, I take credit for solving this week's crossword puzzle, or feel foolish for having yet again spilled coffee into my keyboard. As Honore puts it, 'This responsibility is an essential constituent of our character and identity, without which we would lack both achievements and failures' (at 76). This type of responsibility is the inevitable concomitant of the fact that when humans act, they make their way in the world, changing it in countless ways. Once Honore has drawn our attention to it, the idea of outcome responsibility is familiar, and everywhere. The book's main focus is on the way in which this familiar idea animates the law, particularly the law of torts.' One of the central puzzles of tort theory can be posed as a question about outcome responsibility, and the particular ways in which people can be related to consequences. There are two aspects to this question. The first of these centres around a knot of interpretive questions, about what counts as a consequence in the legally relevant sense, and about how those consequences matter. Honore has done groundbreaking work on this first question, both on his own and together with H.L.A. Hart. Causation and the