Virtue, Law and Morality: Tendency of Responsibility Attribution

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perceptions of far-reaching causal and moral links between spatially and temporally distant events are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility in law as well as in moral commitment. Identifying three competing conceptualisations of responsibility, namely a turn to virtue ethics, processes of juridification, and processes of moralisation, this article explores their different temporal and social dimensions, and the effects they each have on the relation between those held responsible and those affected by the situation that is to be accounted for.