Alfred Schütz, Some Equivocations in the Notion of Responsibility

This brief philosophical essay, originally published in 1958 and republished in 1964, distinguishes external accountability from the first-person experience of responsibility. Schütz begins with legal and moral judgments that expose a person to punishment, including criticism and censure. Within these judgments, he separates responsibility for an action from responsibility to the person, group, or authority demanding an account. His central move is to cross this distinction with that between being held responsible and feeling responsible:

Furthermore, I submit that these two notions of responsibility cannot fully coincide and that any philosophical analysis of the problem of responsibility must remain incomplete without taking into account its subjective aspect.

Drawing on Max Weber, Schütz calls the actor’s own understanding “subjective meaning” and another person’s interpretation “objective meaning.” He immediately qualifies this terminology: observers’ interpretations also depend on their particular attitudes. The distinction therefore concerns perspectives on action, not an opposition between private feeling and an impartial external truth.

The essay develops this argument through the different consequences of wrongdoing. External accountability brings sanctions; felt responsibility can produce regret, remorse, or repentance without another person’s condemnation. Schütz distinguishes this experience of guilt from psychoanalytic “guilt-feeling,” locating it in responsibility for an irreversible past. Orestes’ unresolved suffering and atomic scientists’ distress despite governmental honors illustrate why acquittal or approval cannot settle subjective responsibility. Conversely, Antigone exemplifies an action motivated by personal duty that the law condemns. Agreement about responsibility for an act thus need not imply recognition of the authority judging it.

Schütz then extends the distinction from responsibility to norms. A law means different things to its legislator, those subject to it, the court interpreting it, and its enforcers:

Duty has a different meaning as defined by me autonomously and as imposed on me from outside.

This is more than a contrast between obedience and disobedience: the same norm acquires different meanings through the positions of those who formulate, receive, interpret, and enforce it. Schütz consequently suggests that questions of determinism in ethics and law must also be reformulated according to whether they concern subjective or objective meaning, although he does not develop that analysis here.

The closing paragraph transfers the argument to collective relations through Sumner’s distinction between in-group and out-group. A group’s acknowledgment of responsibility differs from responsibility attributed to it by outsiders:

It is one thing if, in the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders were held responsible by the Allied Powers, and quite another thing if they were held answerable by the German people.

The essay’s contribution is a compact framework for distinguishing attribution, felt obligation, and recognized authority. Its progression from individual guilt to the interpretation of norms and collective accountability shows why responsibility cannot be adequately understood through external judgment alone.