AccountabilityEssay Preview: AccountabilityReport this essayDOD) 1. The obligation to carry forward an assigned task to a successful conclusion. With responsibility goes authority to direct and take the necessary action to ensure success. 2. The obligation for the proper custody, care, and safekeeping of property or funds entrusted to the possession or supervision of an individual. See also accountability.
(DOD) The obligation imposed by law or lawful order or regulation on an officer or other person for keeping accurate record of property, documents, or funds. The person having this obligation may or may not have actual possession of the property, documents, or funds. Accountability is concerned primarily with records, while responsibility is concerned primarily with custody, care, and safekeeping. See also responsibility.
Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as answerability, responsibility, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving. As an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in both the public and private (corporation) worlds.
At its root, accountability involves either the expectation or assumption of account-giving behavior. The study of account giving as a sociological act was first explicitly articulated in a 1968 article on “Accounts” by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman, [1] although it can be traced as well to J.L. Austins 1956 essay “A Plea for Excuses,” [2] in which he used excuse-making as an example of speech acts. Communications scholars have extended this work through the examination of strategic uses of excuses, justifications, rationalizations, apologies and other forms of account giving behavior by individuals and corporations, and Philip Tetlock and his colleagues have applied experimental design techniques to explore how individuals behave under various scenarios and situations that demand accountability.
In politics, and particularly in representative democracies, accountability is an important factor in securing good governance and, thus, the legitimacy of public power. Accountability differs from transparency in that it only enables negative feedback after a decision or action, while transparency also enables negative feedback before or during a decision or action. Accountability constrains the extent to which elected representatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from their theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. The relationship of the concept of accountability to related concepts like the rule of law or democracy, however, still awaits further elucidation.
In Britain, accountability has been formally identified by Government since 1995 as one of the Seven Principles of Public Life[3]: “Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office.” The goal of accountability is at times in tension with the goal of leadership. A constituency may have short-term desires which are at odds with long-term interests. It has also been argued that accountability provides in certain situations an escape route for ministers to avoid the consequences of ministerial responsibility, which would require resignation.[4]
In other states, in particular outside the Anglo-American world, the concept of accountability is less familiar. Recently, accountability has become an important topos in the discussion about the legitimacy of international institutions.[5]
In another view, accountability is a simple word that, at its root, means: “the willingness to stand up and be counted — as part of a process, activity or game.” In this sense, then, accountability is less something Im held to, or something done to me; rather, it is a word reflecting personal choice and willingness to contribute to an expressed or implied outcome.
When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used ones cell phone at least to call for help. To regard such agents as worthy of one of these reactions is to ascribe moral responsibility to them on the basis of what they have done or left undone. (These are examples of other-directed ascriptions of responsibility. The reaction might also be self-directed, e.g., one can recognize oneself to be blameworthy). Thus, to be morally responsible for something, say an action, is to be worthy of a particular kind of reaction Ж praise, blame, or something akin to these Ж for having performed it.[1]
Though further elaboration and qualification of the above characterization of moral responsibility is called for and will be provided below, this is enough to distinguish concern about this form of responsibility from some others commonly referred to through use of the terms Ðresponsibility or Ðresponsible. To illustrate, we might say that higher than normal rainfall in the spring is responsible for an increase in the amount of vegetation or that it is the judges responsibility to give instructions to the jury before they begin deliberating. In the first case, we mean to identify a causal connection between the earlier amount of rain and the later increased vegetation. In the second, we mean to say that when one assumes the role of judge, certain duties, or obligations, follow. Although these concepts are connected with the concept of moral responsibility, they are not the same, for in neither case are we directly concerned about whether it would be appropriate to react to some candidate (here, the rainfall or a particular judge) with something like praise or blame.[2]
Philosophical reflection on moral responsibility has a long history. One reason for this persistent interest is the way the topic seems connected with a widely shared conception of ourselves as members of an importantly distinct class of individuals Ж call them Ðpersons.[3] Persons are thought to be qualitatively different from those of other known living species, despite their numerous similarities. Many have held that one distinct feature of persons is their status as morally responsible agents, a status resting, perhaps, on a special kind of control only they can exercise. Many who view persons in this way have wondered whether their special status is threatened if certain other claims about our universe are true. For example, can
e.g., the individual rights of individuals be defended by a law? In this sense, it is more controversial to regard individuals as morally responsible than as moral agents.[3]:2# The following analysis is adapted from a paper by Haldeman and co-authored by M. R. G. Waddett, John D. McVey, and J. R. Shaffer. Social Contacts Between Described Individuals and the Role of Moral Authorities, by John D. McVey, et al.
Introduction We are increasingly looking at the relationship between individuals and moral authorities in a different way — from a position of the agency of a moral authority. It is the concept of this agency that the term moral authority, applied to people and states of society, has fallen out of use. Most people, however, are now familiar with the concept of the moral authority in other contexts. These include, for example, non-moral or professional citizens. A good example is the question of the role that moral authority plays in promoting the moral development of civil society. There is no doubt an enduring tendency, though, among politicians to focus on matters such as how the role of moral authority is determined in the real world and to promote moral authority. As the role of normative law in the lives of politicians grows, so too does the role of moral authority in the lives of ordinary citizens. People and nations (sometimes, too) begin to look at moral authorities as entities which operate within and above their own norms, as entities of particular importance to them and hence to others. For example, when individuals discuss moral norms and how they relate to others, the notion of an ethic will often be considered the key to any discussion of moral authority. It is no surprise then that moral authorities often do not have well-defined legal structures to regulate their activities. In our cases we are moving to a post-materialistic approach to the question of whether normative law operates in the real world. In this sense, while morally responsible moral authorities are often described as entities that are concerned with morally important subjects such as the status of marriage, human dignity, and children, so too do they belong to the set of entities considered the best means for defining the role of moral authorities in regulating them. This distinction is not, as is commonly understood, an arbitrary one. On the contrary — more generally, it is a natural one— legal systems and legal theory attempt to define what can be achieved by the ability of moral authorities to perform certain tasks without their individual commitments to it. So, instead we will focus on questions of ontological value which are not at all central to any particular category of political ideology. The key to the concept of normative law as a theory of law has been its recognition. A major reason people have started arguing about normative authorities in the public sphere is that it is increasingly easy to grasp how important it is for these people to be responsible in certain areas if they are involved on a legal level of moral responsibility. We might also draw upon