Moral responsibility can attach to acts regardless of the actor’s intentions

Evidence

In Colonus Oedipus explicitly denies that his transgressions were his own acts, and interrupts the Chorus, who refers to what he has done, by insisting that it was “No doing of mine.” What he denies is not that he caused the death of a man at the crossroads (that he had always known) but that he murdered his father, which is a different act, and one which he had tried specifically to avoid. In what sense was he responsible for this act? By disowning the terrible thing done (parricide) he isn’t saying that he didn’t intend to kill. In that sense he recognizes himself as the owner of a responsible act (as an agent). But he also claims that the act turned out to be not his own, that he was an unwitting instrument (agent) of the gods, and that as such his own intention was irrelevant. Yet when he discovers what has been done, he knows he must act—not because he admits or claims “responsibility,” but because he cannot live in the knowledge of who he is and what, being who he is, he has done to his father and his mother. That knowledge demands some resolution. Although Oedipus did not know “the moral meaning” of his transgressive act at the time it was performed he nonetheless suffers for it. His subjects aren’t immune from suffering either even though they have done nothing “to deserve it.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 453

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Distinguishes being an agent (intending the act) from being answerable for its moral meaning — a genuinely spare, layered account of responsibility that resists one-sentence summary and sits with you.
• SHARE: For anyone who teaches Oedipus or works on blame and moral luck — the move from ‘I caused the death’ to ‘I did not murder my father’ is a precise philosophical distinction worth passing on.
• XREF: connects to: Meaning is produced in observers’ minds, not in actors’ intentions. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 64; Controlling another’s acts should make one discount those acts as evidence of character — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 357