Responsible Persons: thinking about resentment, trust and hope in everyday life

Contributor(s): Professor Cheshire Calhoun | Join us for the Brian Barry Memorial Lecture, an annual event honouring the work of political philosopher and former colleague, Professor Brian Barry.

Embedded in our social practices are three distinct, default conceptions of a responsible person connected with three distinct basic expectations of and stances toward responsible persons. First is the conception of responsible persons as capable of living up to normative expectations and thus being accountability responsible. Second is a conception of responsible persons as in fact disposed to satisfy minimal normative expectations and thus as compliance responsible. Third is a conception of responsible persons as responsibility takers, that is, as both capable of electing and disposed at least sometimes to actually take the initiative to do good things that could be omitted without blame.

In this event Cheshire Calhoun argues that these conceptions are not competing and are rather jointly essential for capturing the complex ways we think about and interact with responsible persons and the centrality of resentment, trust, and hope in everyday life.

Meet our speaker and chair

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy and head of Philosophy faculty at Arizona State University. She has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her work stretches across the philosophical subdisciplines of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy.

Kai Spiekermann (@SpiekermannKai) is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at LSE. Among his research interests are normative and positive political theory, philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology and environmental change.

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