Responsibility

RESPONSIBILITY Miranda Joseph

Definitions of “responsibility” range from the positive quality of “capability,” of being reliable or trustworthy (e.g., with regard to payment of a debt), to the status of “being in charge” and thus having “a duty” or “moral obligation” toward someone or to do something, to a state of potential or actual guilt, of “liability” (OED; Allan 2011–14). “Responsibility” is also a key term in neoliberal discourse and practice.1 The concept of “personal 1.

The naming of federal laws is one symptom of the neoliberal obsession with “responsibility” that has endured from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, including the 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and 367

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responsibility” has been deployed to mobilize consent for shifting the burden of social welfare from the state onto families and individuals. And the rhetoric and practice of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has likewise become prominent in recent decades to legitimate free-market capitalism and often specifically the non-regulation of corporations. These neoliberal deployments build on the conjunction of “rights and responsibilities” that is the common sense of liberal citizenship. For example, the pairing of “rights and responsibilities” is one rubric through which the US Department of Homeland Security Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services articulates US citizenship to “learners” (those considering applying for citizenship). The office lists “rights” to freedom of expression and worship, trial by jury, voting, eligibility for particular federal government jobs, and running for office, and “freedom to pursue ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’” and “responsibilities” to obey laws, pay taxes, serve on juries and “defend the country if the need should arise.”2 Meanwhile, “responsibility” is freely deployed across the political spectrum to inspire ethical action and galvanize people to whatever action is being called “responsible” (“Drink responsibly”). “Responsibility” is a seductive term, calling upon us to voluntarily “do the right thing,” as the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company’s “Responsibility Project” would have it (Liberty Mutual Insurance). By contrast, “accountability” suggests a regime in which you will do the right thing or be punished (Joseph 2014, 12–13). Conversely, accusations of irresponsibility are also widely deployed to disparage the actions of the other in a political opposition, whether that other is the Wall Street financier or the pregnant teen of color.

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the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, among others ( Joseph 2014, 161). While the rights listed may not be the most urgent for immigrants seeking citizenship, the responsibilities may be daunting, precisely because they fall on individuals, understood to be sovereign willful subjects. See Lavin (2008) for a full discussion of this issue and an attempt to formulate what he calls “postliberal responsibility.”

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Lisa Duggan argues that “valorized concepts of privatization and personal responsibility travel widely across the rhetorics of contemporary policy debates, joining economic goals with cultural values” (2003, 14). Privatization and personal responsibilization are also practices that support upward redistribution of wealth; as Duggan says, “Social service functions are privatized through personal responsibility as the proper functions of the state are narrowed, tax and wage costs in the economy are cut and more social costs are absorbed by civil society and the family” (2003, 15–16). The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which Bill Clinton claimed would “end welfare as we know it” (quoted in Vobejda 1996) exemplifies this phenomenon. It linked intervention in kinship and gender relations (by requiring women to identify the biological fathers of their children who were to be held responsible for supporting those children, limiting the number of children eligible for benefits, and funding various programs promoting marriage) to the coercive promotion of “responsibility” through work (Anna Marie Smith 2002). The discourse of personal responsibility has racial, class, and gender implications, building on “culture of poverty” discourse, which characterizes poor people of color as lacking both work ethic and ability to defer gratification, and thus as irresponsible. The 1965 “Moynihan Report,” (officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), which described “the Negro Family” as trapped in a “tangle of pathology,” is a persistent touchstone in popular and policy discourse in the US for the claim that people of color are poor because they do family wrong. But the idea that personal responsibility means the enactment of certain gender and life course norms and can cure all ills have come to seem obvious, at least on the right. On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Juan Williams (2006)—in an op-ed in the New York Times—offered a “prescription” for curing poverty: “Finish high school, at least. Wait until your 20s before marrying, and wait until you’re married before having children. Once you’re in the workforce, stay in: take any job, because building on the experience will prepare you for a

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better job. Any American who follows that prescription will be at almost no risk of falling into extreme poverty.” And in a 2012 speech at the Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Rick Santorum used nearly identical language: “Graduate from high school, work hard, and get married before you have children and the chance you will ever be in poverty is just 2 percent” (quoted in Matthews 2012). While this version of “responsibility” has been used to punish poor people of color (and distract us from critically assessing important economic policies, as per Brett Williams 1994), in fact, norms of responsible temporal/financial life management differ in conjunction with racial, gender, and class formation projects. While the New York Times performs this scolding of the poor for its (presumably more affluent) readers, it also offers them financial advice that treats those readers as entrepreneurs—responsible by virtue of taking and managing risk in financial markets, by investing for retirement, and leveraging (borrowing) for and against their homes (Joseph 2014, 71–72). Meanwhile, financiers, who are financially liquid enough to reinvent themselves at the drop of a hat (or the stock market), are not building a life over time and are not held to the same standards of responsibility. This difference became a source of class conflict (or at least resentment) in the wake of the financial crisis. For instance, on August 1, 2012, the New York Times featured a story on the left side of the first business page headlined “Jury Clears ExCitigroup Manager of Charges” (Lattman 2012). It reported that an executive had been accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of misrepresenting a deal to clients—a deal in which the bank put together a derivative financial instrument (a collateralized debt obligation) that it sold and simultaneously “bet against”—but had been acquitted. However, the article reported, the jury also offered a statement urging the SEC to continue “investigating the financial industry.” The article then offered this interpretation: “The statement appears to echo frustration felt by many Americans that Wall Street executives had not been held responsible for its questionable actions leading up to the financial

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crisis.” Meanwhile, on the right side of the same page, an article reported that the Federal Housing Finance Agency had once again rejected the idea of offering debt forgiveness to mortgage holders (Appelbaum 2012). The crux of the reasoning seemed to come at the end of the article, which reported that the head of the agency, Edward DeMarco, feared that doing so would provide an incentive for mortgage holders to default. As law professor Brent White (2009) has argued, the social norm of financial “responsibility” involves a double standard in which individuals are morally obliged to keep paying, even when it is financially irrational because the value of the house is substantially less than the mortgage debt. This norm of “responsibility” is often reinforced through discourses of “moral hazard”—if one debtor is given a break then all others will expect the same.3 By contrast, a corporation (or investment banker) has no such moral obligation but rather is expected to make a “rational” financial decision to “walk away” from unprofitable or unmanageable debts and contracts, to file for bankruptcy, get a fresh start, and thus fulfill their responsibilities to shareholders. However, the one-dimensional view of corporate responsibility to financial goals, such as profit or so-called “shareholder value,” expressed in this double standard has not gone entirely uncontested. The concept of corporate social responsibility has been deployed to suggest that corporations may have more diverse or complex responsibilities (Ghobadian et al. 2015; see also Garriga 3.

“Moral hazard” has also been used to enforce the debts of the Greek nation. As Bloomberg reports, a new European Central Bank policy document dated July 2015 explicitly limits emergency liquidity assistance relative to “moral hazard” (Black 2015). In the context of the 2015 Greek debt crisis, the hazard is usually taken to be the possibility that other countries will follow Greece in expecting and demanding debt relief. But as Mackintosh (2015) points out in a Financial Times column, it is not only the borrowers that might be irresponsible: “There are two sets of moral hazard over Greece. First is the moral hazard of the lenders. Just like the criminally irresponsible banks in the run up to the 2007 subprime crisis, lenders took no account of Greece’s ability to repay when advancing them ludicrously cheap loans.” But in this context, as in the mortgage crisis, the standards of “responsibility” are not the same for the financial institution that lends as for the social entity that borrows (whether the homeowner or nation).

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and Melé 2004). CSR has been understood to indicate moral or ethical obligations that must be met in addition to financial responsibility (profit, shareholder value). Corporations are sometimes conceived of as “citizens” and thus as bearing both “rights and responsibilities.” Increasingly, social responsibility is cast as instrumental for, or even integral to, the financial goals of the corporation (Frederick 1994). And contemporary “social entrepreneurship” seeks to build enterprises from the ground up to pursue “social” goods in ways that are financially sustainable or even profitable within a capitalist economy. Of course, the limits of CSR are well recognized. Whether reactive to protest (McDonnell et al. 2015) or proactive, by promoting socially responsible efforts, especially with regard to the environment through “green” or “social” accounting as well as other marketing strategies, corporations seek to manage their “stakeholder relationships.” Scholars on the left have critically assessed CSR as an effort to legitimate and thus preserve capitalism itself and thus as strategy for containing radical critique (Dunne 2007). Left critics have become practiced at recognizing deployments of “responsibility” that create and reinforce social hierarchies by legitimating capitalism itself, forming race, gender, and class through differentiating standards and expectations, placing criminal blame and financial burden on individuals rather than systems and isms. Even so, we invoke “responsibility” ourselves to inspire and galvanize radical action in ourselves and to point to the failings, the “irresponsibility,” of others. Esther Wang’s (2011) review of The Next American Revolution, by renowned radical Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige, is entitled “The Responsibility of Radicals.” This title suggests that the project of the book is to articulate that responsibility, a responsibility not merely to protest but to build alternative institutions. Others offer different views about the responsibilities of radicals. Philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that “no justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are

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already dead” (Derrida 1994, xix). And he argues that the disjuncture between justice and law imposes a “responsibility” to examine the boundaries of the law, “recalling the history, the origin and subsequent direction, thus the limits, of concepts of justice, the law and right, of values, norms, prescriptions that have been imposed and sedimented there” (Derrida 1992, 19) and pursue the ongoing effort to make the law fulfill “the classical emancipatory ideal” (ibid., 28; see also Joseph 2014, 54–55). Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak learns from Derrida that “responsible action” requires accounting, requires deploying the “calculus” of “accountable reason,” even while we keep “always in view” that “if responsible action is fully formulated or justified within the system of the calculus, it cannot retain its accountability to the trace of the other” (1994, 427–28; see also Joseph 2014, 141–42). Similarly, Angela Davis suggests that statistics showing the racial disparities in incarceration impose on us a “responsibility of understanding,” specifically of understanding the “racist logic” (and the “encounter of gender and race”) that determines this empirically documented, statistically represented result (Davis 64; see also Joseph 2014, 35). These positive invocations of “responsibility” by those who are well aware of the violence to which it has contributed suggest that the critique of responsibility is not a call for chaos or a call to excuse all harmful acts as the results of (unaccountable) structures instead of people. Rather, as Lavin argues, citing Judith Butler’s 1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, “drawing attention to the production and reproduction of conditions of unfreedom has the inciteful (and insightful) effect of enhancing our own responsibility for their perpetuation” (2008, 99). That is, while we should resist the dominant discourses of responsibility that are deployed to locate blame and debt in those already less powerful, we still must take responsibility for understanding and transformation. SEE ALSO:

Accountability; Liberal; Rights; Sovereignty

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