Responsibility and technology

the expanding relationship

Carl Mitcham

pp. 3-39

in: Paul T. Durbin (ed), Technology and responsibility, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

The term "responsibility" is of relatively recent provenance. Its earliest known occurrence, in Jeremy Bentham's A Fragment on Government (1776), describes "the responsibility of the governors" as the right of a subject to a public explanation for "every act of power that is exerted over him."¹ In another early use, James Madison in The Federalist No. 63 (1788) argues that, "Responsibility in order to be reasonable must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party." A hundred years later an author in The Nineteenth Century magazine could note that as the British "dominion extended ... the responsibilities became greater and warfare more scientific."² When William Butler Yeats, in 1914, takes Responsibilities as the title for a collection of verse exploring "a sterner conscience" framed by disenchantment and worldly obligations, it foreshadows the central role the word will play in contemporary life, where "responsibility" has become a touchstone — if not cliché — in discussions of moral issues in art, politics, economics, business, religion, science, and technology.³