Roots of Responsibility (RoR) sought to advance traditional philosophical debates about responsibility and free will by exploring the network of human capacities responsibility involves and the social, institutional and interpersonal contexts in which questions about responsibility arise. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, scientific, and legal research, the project aimed to pursue a comprehensive series of investigations germane to responsibility, cutting across traditional boundaries between metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of law.
Philosophical research on responsibility today stems from early modern debates about causal necessity and freedom of the will, and ultimately from the Stoic problem of reconciling ethics with physics. It is therefore mainly focused on scepticism about the existence of free will and on the question whether moral responsibility is compatible with physical determinism. The main premises of RoR are that this focus is too narrow, and that the traditional problems can only be solved with a deeper understanding of the network of human capacities responsibility involves and the social, institutional and interpersonal context in which questions about responsibility arise.
The project therefore called for a broad cross-disciplinary collaboration, and drew on legal theory, where the literature on the relationships between responsibility, liability and culpability is more sophisticated and more nuanced than it is in philosophy; biological systems theory, which has shown how the activity of more complex systems can harness stochasticity in the activity of the less complex systems of which they are composed; and the philosophy of action, in which the physical, psychological, ethical and intellectual dimensions of human agency are now more clearly articulated and better understood.
As a research project in philosophy, RoR sought to survey, clarify and criticise a large family of interconnected concepts, which we use to describe, explain, and regulate human behaviour in society—e.g. action and agency, voluntariness and choice, moral and legal responsibility and personhood, capacity and control, reasons, intentions, and motives, knowledge and ignorance, coercion and consent. Hence, beyond advancing scholarship, the theoretical programme of RoR had a direct bearing on various areas of contemporary society, especially policy-making and law reform.
