Einige Äquivokationen im Begriff der Verantwortlichkeit

Alfred Schütz’s Einige Äquivokationen im Begriff der Verantwortlichkeit is a brief single-author conceptual essay in social philosophy and phenomenological sociology. Its scope is narrow but decisive: it does not offer a full theory of punishment or free will, but clarifies the equivocations that make responsibility appear simpler than it is. Schütz begins from the legal and moral question of how one may hold a person responsible for what he did or omitted. Even when responsibility is linked to punishment broadly understood as blame, criticism, or censure, the concept already divides into two relations.

Aber selbst wenn wir in diesem Sinn den Begriff „Verantwortlichkeit“ verwenden, kann er zwei verschiedene Dinge bedeuten: Einerseits ist ein Mensch für das verantwortlich, was er tat; andererseits ist er gegenüber jemandem verantwortlich – der Person, der Gruppe oder der Autorität, die ihn verantwortlich macht.

English translation: But even when we use the concept of "responsibility" in this sense, it can mean two different things: on the one hand, a person is responsible for what he has done; on the other, he is responsible to someone—the person, the group, or the authority that holds him responsible.

This distinction between being responsible for something and responsible to someone structures the essay. Responsibility is not merely a property attaching to an act; it is also a relation of answerability before a person, group, authority, conscience, or God. Schütz then introduces a second ambiguity: the difference between attributing responsibility in the second or third person and experiencing it in the first person. His central thesis is that these meanings cannot simply be collapsed.

Außerdem glaube ich, daß diese zwei Begriffe der Verantwortlichkeit nicht vollständig übereinstimmen können und daß jede philosophische Analyse des Problems der Verantwortlichkeit solange unvollständig bleiben muß, wie sie deren subjektiven Aspekt nicht berücksichtigt.

English translation: Moreover, I believe that these two concepts of responsibility cannot fully coincide, and that any philosophical analysis of the problem of responsibility must remain incomplete so long as it fails to take into account its subjective aspect.

To make this claim precise, Schütz uses Max Weber’s distinction between subjective and objective meaning. Subjective meaning is the meaning an action, relation, or situation has for the actor or those affected by it; objective meaning is the meaning assigned by another participant, observer, social scientist, or philosopher. Yet Schütz warns that even objective meaning is not truly objective in an absolute sense, since it remains relative to the interpreter’s standpoint. The point is methodological as well as ethical: legal and moral analysis must distinguish external imputation from lived self-relation.

The subjective side appears most sharply in guilt. If I feel responsible without being held responsible by others, the result is not punishment but remorse, repentance, anguish, or distress. Schütz distinguishes this moral guilt from psychoanalytic guilt-feeling and defines it phenomenologically as the experience of an irreversible past.

Schuld ist das Ergebnis des Gefühls, für etwas verantwortlich zu sein, das man getan oder nicht getan hat, für die Unmöglichkeit, die Vergangenheit wiederherzustellen.

English translation: Guilt is the result of the feeling of being responsible for something one has done or failed to do, of the impossibility of undoing the past.

His examples show the conflict between external judgment and inward answerability. Orestes requires divine reconciliation despite juridical balance; scientists honored for work on atomic weapons may still suffer from responsibility; Antigone can be condemned by law for an act demanded by her own sense of obligation. Thus one may accept responsibility for an act while denying that a particular authority has the right to demand an account.

Schütz next extends the analysis from persons to norms. A law means something different to legislator, citizen, offender, court, and police officer. Duty also changes its sense depending on whether it is self-imposed or imposed from without.

Pflicht hat einen anderen Sinn, wenn sie von mir autonom definiert wird und wenn sie mir von außen auferlegt wird.

English translation: Duty has a different meaning depending on whether it is defined by me autonomously or imposed upon me from outside.

This move broadens the essay’s relevance for jurisprudence and ethics. Questions such as determinism cannot be answered once and for all if the formulation shifts between the actor’s first-person perspective and the observer’s institutional attribution. Responsibility is therefore a layered concept: causal involvement, normative accusation, self-judgment, and answerability to an authority may overlap, but they need not coincide.

The final section transfers the same dialectic to group relations through Sumner’s distinction between in-group and out-group. Responsibility has one meaning when a group recognizes its own deeds and holds members accountable, and another when an outside group accuses it. Schütz’s example is pointed:

Eines ist es, wenn in den Nürnberger Prozessen die Naziführer von den Alliierten zur Verantwortung gezogen werden, und ganz etwas anderes ist es, wenn sie vom deutschen Volk verantwortlich gemacht worden wären.

English translation: It is one thing when, at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders are held to account by the Allies, and quite another when they would have been held responsible by the German people.

The essay’s importance lies in this refusal of a single, flat definition. Schütz does not deny legal or moral judgment; he shows that its meaning depends on standpoint, addressee, and authority. A serious theory of responsibility must therefore ask not only what someone did, but who imputes it, to whom the agent answers, and how the act is lived by the one who feels responsible.