Responsibility to Protect as Discursive Co-Responsibility? : Global Responsibility from a Discourse-Ethical Perspective

Abstract

To protect against serious human rights violations or violations of international humanitarian law the international community of states has attempted to institutionalise the assumption of responsibility at the international level under the term “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)”. Although the basic idea of such a responsibility to protect may be welcome in principle, it is well known that it is associated with a number of problems which, in my view, require us to reconsider the underlying understanding of responsibility to bring to the fore an important component: we are not only responsible for something, but also to someone whom we owe good reasons for our actions. Thus, I argue that an ethics of global responsibility should be based on a discursive concept of responsibility. For only such a concept can enable us to take into account the complexities of current courses of action on the one hand and the normative uncertainties associated with them on the other, by taking into account the interests and needs of all those involved. To develop this idea, I first sketch such a discursive understanding of responsibility. Second, I argue that every concrete individual or institutional attribution of responsibility for individual actions or tasks as well as the concrete duty of justification is based on what Karl-Otto Apel has described as a “primordial co-responsibility”. Third and finally, I will present some of the difficulties of such a discursive conception of responsibility at the global level, in order to then show that these difficulties may continue to exist regardless of the underlying understanding of responsibility, but that they may be solved differently on this basis.