Responsibility

RESPONSIBILITY. - I. LAW. - It may be defined as subjection to the reaction that the legal order attaches to damage (v.). The legal effect of this consists in fact in a reaction operating in the opposite direction to that in which the damage itself operates; this serves to distinguish it from any other legal effect, just as it serves to characterize damage within the system of juridical facts.

The aforementioned reaction, considered from the point of view of the subject designated to bear it, gives rise to a situation of disadvantage constituting responsibility. The purpose of the reaction, that is to say the repression of the damage, is pursued by the law by transferring the burden of the damage from the subject struck by it (the injured party) to another subject; this subject is subjected to the reaction of the law and finds himself under a legal necessity to bear it, independently of his own will, and this condition of his represents precisely responsibility.

It must be firmly borne in mind that the purpose of the reaction against damage consists solely in the repression of the damage itself. Indeed, damage can be repressed, but not erased from the world of facts (quod factum est, infectum fieri nequit). Nor even in the hypothesis in which the advantage enjoyed by the responsible party through the infliction of the damage is greater than the damage inflicted is the reaction of the law directed at obtaining something more than the repression of the damage; that the aforementioned advantage exceeds the damage constitutes an irrelevant circumstance, incapable of modifying, by aggravating it, the reaction against the damage.

The reaction against damage takes concrete form in a compulsory legal relationship between the responsible party and the injured party, by virtue of which the former is bound to compensate the latter.

The passive subject of this relationship, the responsible party, is the author of the act producing the damage; but not only he: indeed, alongside responsibility for damage produced by one's own act (so-called direct responsibility), there exists responsibility for damage produced by another's act (so-called indirect responsibility). This finds application with respect to damage produced by the intentional or negligent acts of so-called auxiliaries in performance (Civil Code, art. 1228) and of domestic servants and employees (art. 2049). Auxiliaries in performance are third parties whose work the debtor avails himself of in the performance of the obligation.

Art. 1228, while it requires that the act of the auxiliary have an intentional or negligent character, does not condition the responsibility of the debtor upon fault, in eligendo or in vigilando, of the debtor himself. The reason may be found in the expediency of not severing the harmful effects from the beneficial effects of the appointment of auxiliaries, with regard to the debtor (cuius commoda eius et incommoda).

In turn, masters and principals are responsible for the damage caused by domestic servants and employees, independently of their own fault. Here too the reason for the rule is to be seen in the inseparability of the harmful effects from the beneficial effects: he who benefits from the work of domestic servants or employees may justly be held to answer, independently of his own fault, for the damage caused by them.

Adriano De Cupis

II. MORALITY

Even before the juridical sphere, responsibility concerns the moral sphere. Christian morality teaches that, independently of the fact of the evangelical law, every man by natural right is responsible before legitimate authority, even in the case of societies constituted by private act, for his actions within the scope of the various attributions of each of them; consequently, while, for example, on the one hand the citizen (speaking of his relations with civil society) is bound to it also morally, that is, in conscience; on the other, the State itself, even if it wished, cannot disregard this, inasmuch as by the same natural right it is bound to procure the common social good and the private good of individuals, which cannot be obtained otherwise than through the existence of responsibility properly so called. In other words, responsibility exists by natural right, nor can the State completely eliminate it from its subjects by exempting them from every responsibility, although, as is obvious, it can restrict it more or less by restricting the field of actions for which the person must give account, diminishing the accumulation of laws that are not indispensable (that is, not essential or extremely useful or of natural right) to the common good.

1. Moral responsibility and moral-juridical responsibility

Setting aside the very improper, not to say erroneous, concept that attributes it to any cause, even of a purely physical order, responsibility belongs to the person, that is, to a subject who is not determined by internal coercion (due to lack of freedom) or by natural causes necessarily producing the action, but only by free choice. In this more proper sense, Christian morality recognizes various species of responsibility: for which the individual is responsible before God and in part before the Church (to the exclusion of others), for everything concerning the action considered under the formal aspect of moral violation, that is, of sin (moral responsibility); before the Church and the State insofar as he acts by perverting the respective juridical order, which usually occurs in crimes and offenses that violate one and the other juridical order (moral-juridical responsibility); and before ecclesiastical or civil society as regards the laws and norms that violate exclusively the one or the other order (likewise moral-juridical responsibility).

2. Subject of responsibility

As every action is imputable to the subject who performs it, so too, and indeed all the more, man ought to be responsible for each of them. Nevertheless, given the ordinary acceptation, it is almost connatural that man be said to be responsible only for what he does wrongly by violating the laws (inasmuch as society does not demand an account from the subject once he has observed them); responsibility denotes in practice, together with the state of subjection to third parties, also the state of violation of the norm or at least the inquiry concerning the possible ascertainment of its violation. For this reason every person can be called to give account (either to God or to the Church or to the State) of every action that has factors of good and evil to be judged. Thus the already mentioned exclusion becomes logical of responsibility in the too broad and equivocal sense attributed to necessary causes, inasmuch as these are not capable or do not have the possibility of discriminating good from evil. And consequently responsibility must be referred to actions that are morally, even if not always juridically, imputable to the person. Therefore, besides all causes lacking freedom at the root, there are excluded from responsibility all persons who are in fact incapable of human acts, that is, of adverted and free acts; and they are so only for the moments of use of reason, those who lack it in an ordinary way only sporadically, or who are in fact deprived of it through accidental circumstances: among these, for one reason or another, are to be numbered the insane, the imbeciles, idiots, the feeble-minded, the hypnotized, drunkards, the mentally deficient in general, saving, whenever the necessary conditions occur, responsibility in cause.

Referring to individual physical or moral persons: a) God alone is absolutely incapable of responsibility, whether moral or moral-juridical. His perfect independence from any other being does not even allow the possibility of responsibility in him to be conceived; it could not even have a purpose, inasmuch as, being he absolute perfection and the very norm of morality on which responsibility depends, there cannot but coincide in him a perfect conformity between the norm itself and his operation; nor, on the other hand, is God capable of moral evil; b) the Church as such, that is, as a public and perfect society of divine-positive right, is capable in the present order of divine providence of responsibility only toward God. The State and, all the more, private individuals have no right to judge actions comprised within the scope of its juridical order, nor has the Church the moral or juridical obligation to give them an account. Nevertheless individual physical and moral persons can be subject to responsibility also with regard to the civil societies to which they in fact belong, for their private activity; and the obligation is of a juridical and moral nature; c) however, the person of the supreme pontiff is excluded by right, even independently of the contingent fact of his sovereignty under international law. These affirmations with regard to God, the Church and the pope must not be interpreted in the sense that their actions are not imputable. In them all the conditions are perfectly fulfilled by which the action is imputed to the subject who performs it, and therefore they themselves are subjects of imputability; d) as for civil society by divine positive right, one must hold that the State is morally and juridically responsible not only before God for its operation, a responsibility that is poured out upon the physical persons through whom it operates, but also, in the ways and terms established by the Divine Redeemer, to the Church; and this even setting aside the responsibility that every private person already owes to the Church as its member.

3. Particular observations

Notwithstanding what has been said thus far, society, whether ecclesiastical or civil, may lawfully in its juridical relations limit or render null the responsibility of its subjects whenever it fails, or only with enormous difficulty succeeds, in being able to identify it. In these cases it would be better said that responsibility, although existing also in the external forum, cannot through external circumstances be perfectly recognized by the authority, and therefore it abstains from considering it. Since, as is easily understood, it appears conformable to natural right that both perfect societies, Church and State, at times either in fact or in principle take no interest in determinate responsibilities of their respective subjects. This is due to the often most evident fact of the impossibility of determining how far responsibility can extend and when in fact all the elements necessary to it occur. The means at the disposal of the two societies, at least considering the external forum, do not suffice to sift every responsibility to perfection. Nevertheless, in taking no interest in it they do not eliminate responsibility in their subjects: it remains intact, as was hinted, before God and partially before the Church in its power of the internal forum. On the other hand it must also be noted that both the Church and the State, likewise in external relations, can demand that their subjects give an account of their operation even if, objectively speaking, through imponderable factors responsibility is lacking in them; in this case, as is obvious, the responsibility for the violation of the law attributed to the subject does not exist before God nor before conscience. In any case, the attribution of responsibility by society to one who has been proved to be incapable of it by right or in fact certainly remains unjust. In this regard it is also opportune to recall that society has the right to prove responsibility only by lawful means; it is never lawful, not even for the State, to resort to means contrary to nature or to the common sense civil for proving in its subjects their possible r., even if, as can happen, by these means it could be proved with certainty.

Lorenzo Simeone