Moral responsibility stands at a crossroads in the depth-psychology corpus, where questions of agency, culpability, intention, and the unconscious forces shaping action converge with unresolved tension. The tradition inherited from Greek antiquity — as Adkins meticulously demonstrates — proves structurally inhospitable to strong notions of moral responsibility: where competitive values dominate and outcomes override intentions, the very conceptual apparatus for imputing responsibility to an interior agent remains underdeveloped. Williams amplifies this genealogical argument by showing that the four elements of responsibility — cause, intention, state, and response — are universal but variously weighted across cultures, such that no single ‘correct’ conception obtains. Ricoeur, approaching from a hermeneutical phenomenology, places responsibility within the dialectic of imputability and debt, extending it both backward into inherited obligation and forward into ecological consequence. The existential tradition, represented by Yalom, radically internalises responsibility: the very syntax of therapeutic speech — ‘I won’t’ rather than ‘I can’t’ — becomes a vehicle for owning authorship of one’s existence. Arendt, as refracted through Hannah’s analysis, locates responsibility in the singularity of the moral self, distinguishing it sharply from rule-following obedience. Inwood’s Stoic account foregrounds the paradox of compatibilism: how fate and responsibility can be reconciled through a psychology of assent. Across these positions, depth psychology consistently presses toward a more capacious, psychically grounded account of responsibility that neither collapses into determinism nor ignores the formative power of unconscious, cultural, and archetypal forces.
There is not, and there never could be, just one appropriate way of adjusting these elements to one another — as we might put it, just one correct conception of responsibility.
Williams argues that responsibility is constituted by four universal elements — cause, intention, state, and response — which are necessarily weighted differently across cultures, precluding any single authoritative conception.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
It is no exaggeration to say that the reconciliation of fate and moral responsibility was the dominant and characteristic problem of Stoic moral philosophy.
Inwood identifies the compatibility of determinism with moral responsibility as the defining tension of Stoic ethics, resolved through an account of assent as the locus of human agency.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
The very different attitude to intentions necessarily found in each of these groups makes it imperative to discover which is the more powerful; for this is bound to be the most important clue to the outlook on life as a whole.
Adkins establishes that the power-balance between competitive and cooperative value-terms in Greek culture is the decisive factor for whether intentions — and hence moral responsibility — can gain evaluative traction.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
with imputability, there can be guilt without realization, without actualization; with responsibility, there can be guilt without intention; the bearing of our acts, a concept we evoked above, extends beyond that of our projects.
Ricoeur distinguishes imputability from responsibility by showing that the latter extends moral guilt beyond intentional action to encompass consequences and inherited obligations.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the full acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions broadens the scope of guilt by diminishing escape hatches. No longer can the individual comfortably rely on such alibis as: ‘I didn’t mean it,’ ‘It was an accident,’ ‘I couldn’t help it.’
Yalom argues that the existential therapeutic stance radically widens moral responsibility by closing off the unconscious, accidental, and compulsive exemptions patients habitually invoke.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
insofar as we think of ourselves as following rules, we can pass off responsibility for our actions to those rules. Arendt was much haunted by the defense that war criminals such as Eichmann offered — that they were only following orders.
Hannah conveys Arendt’s argument that rule-following morality structurally enables the evasion of moral responsibility, as demonstrated by the Eichmann defense of obedience to orders.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
Morality concerns the individual in his singularity. The criterion of right and wrong… depends in the last analysis neither on habits and customs… nor on a command of either divine or human origin, but on what I decide with regard to myself.
Arendt, as presented by Hannah, grounds moral responsibility entirely in the individual’s self-relation, treating the inability to live with oneself as the ultimate moral sanction.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
much of it is not a direct discussion of moral responsibility at all, but a more general survey of Greek terms of value, religious ideas, and social organization.
Adkins frames moral responsibility as inextricably embedded in broader systems of value, religious belief, and social organisation, arguing that it cannot be studied in isolation.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
Any change in a society’s view of this concept… will result from a change in other beliefs, from an increase in knowledge, or from an improvement — or change — in the circumstances or organization of that society.
Adkins proposes that transformations in how moral responsibility is ascribed are always downstream effects of broader social, epistemic, and organisational change.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Contingency, spontaneity, freedom, and responsibility all go hand in hand in her account here, and all are threatened by philosophical understandings of freedom that try to give justifications for our actions.
Hannah presents Arendt’s view that genuine responsibility requires the radical contingency and spontaneity of free action, which philosophical justifications necessarily undermine.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
‘Moral responsibility has no place in them.’ For decisive criticism of Adkins’s use of a distinction between ‘competitive’ and ‘cooperative’ values, see A. A. Long.
Williams flags Adkins’s controversial conclusion that moral responsibility is structurally excluded from competitive Homeric values, while noting the scholarly debate this claim has generated.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
In life in general, as in the courts, the requisite questions can still not usefully be asked, for actions are evaluated primarily in terms of a system of values which raises only questions of success and failure.
Adkins argues that when success-and-failure values dominate a society’s evaluative framework, the questions necessary for ascribing moral responsibility become practically unaskable.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
the cases in which the impermissible does not involve culpability; this is the case in which excuses, previously defined and recognized, contribute to attenuating or canceling the judgment by which the agent is declared to be culpable.
Ricoeur examines the casuistical space between the impermissible and the culpable, showing how excuses and conditions of ignorance complicate straightforward ascriptions of moral responsibility.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the concept of sōphrosynē (which is, as we have seen, a cognitive achievement) accounts for man’s full responsibility in his intentions to which moral judgement ultimately refers, at least according to Greek standards.
Dihle locates the Greek ground of full moral responsibility in the cognitive virtue of sōphrosynē, the self-aware restraint that makes deliberate intention — and thus culpability — possible.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
The modernist responsibility that Giddens refers to has its epigram in the famous line of the poet Rilke, ‘You must change your life.’ Modernity is premised on people’s capacity to change their lives.
Frank uses Giddens and Rilke to characterise modernity’s distinctive form of moral responsibility: the reflexive self-project in which individuals are answerable for the ongoing shape of their own lives.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
We have conceptions of legal responsibility different from any such conception the Greeks had, but that is because we have a different conception of law — not, basically, a different conception of responsibility.
Williams contends that divergences between modern and ancient legal responsibility reflect different conceptions of law and state power rather than fundamentally different understandings of responsibility itself.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
in admitting this we may draw general conclusions as to the defects, from the point of view of moral responsibility, which any moral code or moral theory using Greek presuppositions and Greek terminology must necessarily have.
Adkins concludes that the structural presuppositions of Greek value-language impose permanent deficits on any ethical system built within it when judged by the standard of moral responsibility.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
The quintessential moral disposition is to prefer suffering wrong to allowing or doing wrong — especially when one stands a better chance of avoiding suffering by doing nothing to resist evil.
Hannah articulates the Socratic-Arendtian core of moral responsibility as the willingness to suffer wrong rather than enact it, grounded in the requirement of self-consistency.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
This is a hopeless tangle of values… the tangle of values which prevailed in the Athenian law-courts and assembly, with such disastrous results. The problem is a serious one; and since it is closely related to the problem of moral responsibility, the successive attempts at its solution must be considered.
Adkins uses the Homeric prize-dispute as a microcosm for the conflicting value-systems that complicated the ascription of moral responsibility throughout Greek civic life.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
when questions of responsibility are raised, there is no higher system of values to which appeal may be made, and which may prevent decision being given in terms of such awkward questions.
Adkins identifies the absence of a superordinate value-system as the structural impediment to developing robust moral responsibility in early Greek thought.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
thinking about morality is not congenial to her talent… Were it not for the occurrence of political evil in the form of totalitarianism, Arendt might never have interrupted the flow of her primary and most profound concerns, which were not moral at all, but — loosely and broadly speaking — existential.
Hannah argues that Arendt’s engagement with moral responsibility was catalysed by political evil rather than systematic ethical theory, revealing the existential rather than moral roots of her thought.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Rather than looking at myths morally, archetypal psychology looks at moralities mythically. By considering morals as the claims of the imaginal powers, morality itself becomes imaginal.
Hillman reframes moral responsibility within archetypal psychology by dissolving the autonomous moral agent into a field of imaginal forces, making morality a function of mythic perspective rather than sovereign will.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
the effect which the principal system of values might still have upon moral responsibility… It is hard for a man to become truly agathos, four-square in hands and feet and mind, wrought blameless.
Adkins illustrates through Simonides how the dominant Greek value-system, centring on achieved excellence, continued to obstruct any account of moral responsibility grounded in intention.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
morality in the sense of mores can allow evil to flourish, while both Socratic morality and the quasi-morality of allowable violence define resistance to evil.
Hannah draws Arendt’s distinction between conventional mores and Socratic self-accounting to show that different registers of morality stand in complex and sometimes opposing relations to moral responsibility.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
this final and least punitive acknowledgement of things done involuntarily is intolerable: in itself it destroys what their life would have been otherwise.
Williams uses the case of Ajax to probe the limits of responsibility for states rather than intentions, showing that acknowledgement of involuntary wrong can itself constitute a life-destroying burden.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993aside
This is not to say that the individual is not responsible for choices… Already burdened by illness, the person with AIDS is asked to bear the brunt of the blame for his or her condition.
Pargament cautions against religious scapegoating that collapses moral responsibility for choices into blanket blame for conditions, illustrating how misattributed responsibility compounds suffering.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside
involuntary ideas in dreams… morally incompatible impulses… reveal the true nature of man, though not his whole nature.
Freud introduces the psychoanalytic complication for moral responsibility by arguing that immoral impulses emerging in dreams disclose an authentic stratum of the self that cannot be simply disowned.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside