Overview
Accountability in its everyday sense refers to the ability to render judgment based on someone’s actions. Holding the government accountable means allowing the voters to judge their actions for transparency and competence to decide if power should change hands. Holding a teenager accountable for curfew means judging their adherence to it with consequences for a lack of compliance.
Commentary
Accountability is a really difficult term to use precisely. Everyone grows up in a culture and environment with its own set of norms around agency and obligation, so we load a lot of implications into accountability that can make it very easy to talk past each other.
On a personal note, at a philosophical level, I am generally uninterested in accountability for the past, or what is sometimes called desert-based blame. “Desert” here refers to “deserving” rather than the environment. To the extent that blaming someone in the past might be a deterrent to future actions, I can see the practical use of it, but I don’t generally subscribe to ideas rooted in “deserving.” I just translate a statement like “I believe Bob deserves to suffer” to “I would experience satisfaction at seeing Bob suffer” or “Bob should be the recipient of the consequences of this situation.” I take an instrumental approach, which is to say that the past is unchangeable while the future is potential, so focus on the future.
Consider driving under the influence. If someone causes harm while driving, I can see the value in revoking their driving privileges to prevent future harm, as well as incentivizing treatment as an alternative to incarceration. However, I think someone who drives under the influence without hurting someone should generally receive the same baseline treatment as someone whose intoxicated driving led to a fatal accident. If they had a similar state of mind in similar circumstances prior to getting into their vehicle, then the problem to be corrected is ultimately the same, even if consequences of the problem’s existence differ.
Where I do take interest in accountability is as a tool for keeping agents aligned with a plan for the future. If you accept that you are accountable for something, you signal that you expect to exercise your judgment and agency over that thing. A parent is accountable for their child’s wellbeing. A child is accountable for their homework. A teacher is accountable for teaching a child the skills to do that homework. However, all of these systems of accountability are interconnected; if one link in this chain collapses, whether it’s a neglectful parent or a child with an undiagnosed learning disability or an overworked teacher, it might be rather unreasonable to hold the others to account.
Can a teacher receiving an expanded student class size that violates union regulations (something that happened multiple times in the course of my own schooling) be held accountable for a drop in test scores? Can those students be held accountable for not performing as well as the students who came before them? Can the parents be held accountable for not knowing enough to be a part-time at-home educator for their child after a 9-5 that might not even make ends meet? I would argue that none of these individuals can reasonably be held to account, even if it is possible for them to overexert themselves in the short-term to meet expectations. Instead, what is required is a systemic shift in resources: more educators need to be hired and more classes need to be built. Children sitting on the ground to study Calculus because their parents haven’t figured out how to fund the education system in their own community is, to me, the very obvious and disgraceful problem to be corrected. In that case, I hold people accountable not necessarily for their role in a system, but what they advocate for in terms of changes to the system.
If someone believes we should cut taxes that fund education and social services, whether they’re a parent or a teacher or even a student, and it goes predictably wrong, accountability should come in the form of that person’s judgment being recognized as lacking competency. If a politician wants to raise taxes to fund services but then allocates the funds ineffectively, that official should also be recognized as lacking leadership or budgeting skills required to implement their plans. If someone sits out of the discussion in a desire to remain non-political or non-controversial, that person should be held accountable for supporting the system as it currently exists and lacking the initiative or courage to improve the world they live in while leeching off the risks others take.
To put it simply, I’m mostly interested in holding people accountable for the systemic changes they support, not for their individual role in a broken system.
When it comes to substance use disorders, I am staunchly against moralizing accountability at a systemic level. One of the reasons I find some of A.A.’s ideas fairly horrifying to apply at a personal level is that it prompts the participant to take a “moral inventory” of “defects of character” while surrendering to “God as we understood Him” by “praying only for knowledge of His will for us,” and to seek an “easier, softer way” is to be an “unfortunate” who is “constitutionally incapable” of “rigorous honesty” because they “seem to have been born that way.” I’ll always add this caveat to my A.A. opinions: if it works for you, great. It’s aggressively rooted in Protestant theology and moral psychology, but that can work for people whose backgrounds and values align with that. For others, it can be deeply alienating.
Therapeutic and clinical institutions largely inherit these moral psychology structures. If someone prays to God but still suffers, a priest can argue the issue lies in a lack of faith, a secret sin, or weakness in committing to God’s will. If someone undergoes therapy but still suffers, a dogmatic practitioner can argue that the issue lies in the client’s failure to internalize the tools, a repressed dysfunctional core belief, or generally resistant or non-compliant attitudes. The practitioner and the manual are akin to a preist and scripture; all the messy and complex details are attributed to the dysfunctionality of the individual ego while the system and institutions remain unchallenged. What was once labeled sinful behavior that the individual is responsible for abstaining from is mapped onto a pathology that the individual is responsible for managing. “Healing” from trauma by “doing the work” takes on the same moralistic undertones as purifying oneself of sins through confession and atonement.
Even the relationship with law and the judicial system is imported. European monarchies practiced a form of surveillance where citizens who failed to show up for church services with verbal confessions or sign written confessions were marked as potential rebels. In modern Western nation-states, judicial systems allow forensic psychologists and psychiatrists to provide testimony that is based on unfalsifiable subjective constructs, if not outright pseudoscience. A licensed medical professional possesses the power to deprive individuals of due process and constitutional rights on the basis of a subjective clinical assessment of someone’s internal state of mind.
In so many of these aspects of our institutions, moralization serves to further the assignment of blame to individuals and away from the systems at work. Notably, if we did want to assign blame to individuals within a system, we ought to start with those who have the most influence and power over shaping it. Yet, it is precisely those individuals who escape with the least accountability while deflecting dysfunction onto those with less influence. In the same way that the moral debate of a death penalty cannot be separated from the requirement that we trust an institution to decide when it should be enacted, we similarly cannot discuss accountability for individuals without considering the institutions that administer it.
I have sat in multiple groups where someone in their 20s describes being given drugs by their parents as teenagers after repeated physical and sexual abuse, but remains entirely focused on blaming themselves for choosing to accept and use the substances. There is no impulse from therapists or facilitators to discourage that notion, instead seeing that as a sign of increased accountability and agency. I’m no expert, but I tend to think people who survived an extremely long history of trauma are very likely to have internalized the idea that they are to blame for their trauma in order to maintain the belief that the world is fair and fundamentally good, and what is framed as heightened accountability and agency can just as easily be reinforcing a pattern of self-blame and low self-worth.
Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability
Some scholars like David Shoemaker have attempted to delineate some of the nuanced interpretations packed into “accountability.” Specifically, Shoemaker argues that a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility should treat attributability, answerability, and accountability as three distinct components.