5.1 Preliminary remarks on basic structure and relevance of the concept of responsibility

Responsibility is an important and central concept when discussing the responsibility of individuals or groups for certain issues. When you attribute responsibility to someone or hold someone accountable, you are ascribing responsibility to that person. Even if we are familiar with the term responsibility in everyday conversations and contexts, on closer inspection it turns out to be very complex. Responsibility is anything but easy to grasp.

Example

This is also true in the area of mining. The two questions alone

"Who is responsible for mining?"

and

"What is mining responsible for?"

can lead to long and contentious discussions.

Responsibility can also have an ethical dimension, namely when it comes to ethical or moral issues. In the learning units before, we have already seen that ethical challenges and conflicts can be very complex and that their solutions are by no means obvious. The same applies to responsibility. The attribution of responsibility is very preconditional. It is linked to a society's fundamental systems of values and norms, as well as to assumptions about which actors are capable of being responsible. We then speak of normative or epistemological assumptions that flow into the attribution of responsibility. The basic structure of responsibility and its differentiation from the concepts of guilt and liability will be shown below. Some different types of responsibility are then presented. This know-how can be helpful in answering the question of what responsibility people from mining can have in different situations.