The Limits of Individual Responsibility: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Reversal of Agent-Act-Consequence

Abstract

This essay frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. Responsibility is a shattered (Paul Ricœur) when considered too narrowly as a problem of act, agency, and individual freedom. Constructively, the essay introduces Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the most promising theological dialogue partner for rethinking the meaning of responsibility today. His challenge is to find a way of talking about responsibility that does not collapse into individualism or become ensconced within a univocal logic that subsumes socioeconomic, cultural, and religious differences within itself. The claim is that Bonhoeffer's reflections on the center, boundaries, and limits of responsibility are helpful today to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of responsibility, when linear agent-act-consequence connections to distant others and far away harms are increasingly difficult to trace.