Responsibility

RESPONSIBILITY. - I. LAW. - It may be defined as subjection to the reaction which damage (v.). The legal effect of damage 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 legal facts.

The aforesaid reaction, considered from the standpoint of the subject designated to bear it, gives rise to a situation of disadvantage, constituting r. The purpose of the reaction, namely the repression of damage, is pursued by the law through the transfer of the burden of the damage from the subject affected by it (the injured party) to another subject; this subject is subjected to the reaction of the law and finds himself under the legal necessity of bearing it, independently of his own will, and this condition of his precisely represents r.

It must be firmly held that the purpose of the reaction against damage consists solely in the repression of the damage itself. Indeed, damage may be repressed, but not erased from the world of facts (quod factum est, infectum fieri nequit). Nor, in the event that the advantage accruing to the person responsible from causing the damage is greater than the damage caused, is the legal reaction directed towards obtaining anything beyond the repression of the damage; the fact 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 juridical obligation 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 he alone: in fact, alongside r. for damage produced by one’s own act (so-called direct r.), there exists r. for damage produced by the act of another (so-called indirect r.). The latter applies to damage produced by the intentional or negligent acts of the so-called auxiliaries in performance (Civil Code, art. 1228) and of domestic servants and employees (art. 2049). Auxiliaries in performance are third parties whose services the debtor employs in performing the obligation.

Article 1228, while requiring that the auxiliary’s act be intentional or negligent, does not make the debtor’s r. conditional upon negligence, in eligendo or in vigilando, on the part of the debtor himself. The reason may be found in the desirability of not separating the harmful effects from the beneficial effects of appointing auxiliaries, in relation to the debtor (cuius commoda eius et incommoda).

In turn, principals and employers are responsible for damage caused by domestic servants and employees, independently of their own negligence. Here too, the rationale of the provision must be found in the inseparability of harmful effects from beneficial effects: whoever derives benefit from the work of domestic servants or employees should rightly be answerable, independently of his own negligence, for the damage caused by them.

1. Moral responsibility and moral-juridical responsibility. – Leaving aside the very improper, not to say erroneous, concept that attributes responsibility to every cause, including those exclusively physical in nature, responsibility belongs properly to the person, that is, to a subject who is determined neither by internal coercion (due to lack of freedom) nor by natural causes necessary for performing the action, but solely by free choice. In this more proper sense, Christian morality recognizes various kinds of responsibility: the individual is responsible before God and, in part, before the Church (to the exclusion of others) for everything concerning action considered under the formal aspect of moral violation, that is, sin (moral responsibility); before the Church and the State insofar as he acts by perverting the respective juridical order, as ordinarily occurs in crimes and offenses that violate both juridical orders (moral-juridical responsibility); and before ecclesiastical or civil society with regard to laws and norms that exclusively violate one or the other order (likewise moral-juridical responsibility).

2. Subject of responsibility. – Just as every action is imputable to the subject who performs it, so too—indeed, with even greater reason—man ought to be responsible for each of them. Nevertheless, given the ordinary meaning of the term, it is almost innate that man is called responsible only for what he does wrongly by violating laws (since society does not demand an account of the subject when he has observed them); in practice, responsibility denotes, together with a state of subjection to others, also a state of violation of the norm, or at least an inquiry into whether violation of it has occurred. For this reason every person may be called upon to give an account (either to God, the Church, or the State) of every action containing elements of good and evil subject to examination. Thus the previously mentioned exclusion of necessary causes from responsibility, in its excessively broad and equivocal sense, becomes logical, since these are neither capable nor able to discriminate good from evil. Consequently, responsibility must refer to actions that are morally, even if not always juridically, imputable to the person. Therefore, in addition to all causes fundamentally lacking freedom, all persons who are in fact incapable of human acts—that is, conscious and free acts—are excluded from responsibility; and those who ordinarily lack the use of reason only intermittently, or who are in fact deprived of it by accidental circumstances, are responsible only during the periods in which they possess II. Among these, for one reason or the other, are to be included the insane, the imbeciles, idiots, the feebleminded, the hypnotized, the intoxicated, and the mentally impaired in general, except, whenever the necessary conditions are present, for responsibility in causa.

With reference to individual physical or moral persons: a) God alone is absolutely incapable of responsibility, whether moral or moral-juridical. His perfect independence from every other being does not even allow the possibility of responsibility in him to be conceived; nor could it have any purpose, since, being absolute perfection and the very norm of morality on which responsibility depends, the perfect conformity between that norm itself and his activity cannot fail to coincide in him; moreover, God is incapable of moral evil; b) the Church as such, that is, as a public and perfect society of divine-positive law, is, in the present order of divine providence, capable of responsibility only toward God. The State, and all the more private individuals, have no right to examine actions falling within the scope of its juridical order, nor does the Church have a moral or juridical obligation to give them an account. Nevertheless, individual physical and moral persons may be subject to responsibility also with regard to the civil societies to which they in fact belong, on account of their private activity; and the obligation is juridical and moral in character; c) the person of the supreme pontiff is, however, excluded by law, independently even of the contingent fact of his sovereignty under international law. These assertions concerning God, the Church, and the pope must not be interpreted to mean that their actions are not imputable. In them all the conditions under which an action is imputed to the subject who performs it are perfectly present, and therefore they themselves are subjects of imputability; d) as regards civil society under divine-positive law, it must be held that the State is morally and juridically responsible not only before God for its activity—a responsibility that is reflected in the physical persons through whom it acts—but also, in the ways and under the terms established by the Divine Redeemer, before the Church; and this independently of 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, both ecclesiastical and civil, may legitimately, in its juridical relations, limit or render null the responsibility of its subjects whenever it cannot identify it, or can do so only with enormous difficulty. In such cases it would be more accurate to say that responsibility, although existing also in the external forum, cannot, owing to external circumstances, be perfectly recognized by the authority, and that the authority therefore refrains from taking it into consideration. For, as is readily understood, it appears consistent with natural law that both perfect societies, Church and State, should at times, either in practice or as a matter of principle, take no interest in certain responsibilities of their respective subjects. This is often due to the very evident impossibility of determining how far responsibility may extend and when all the elements necessary for it are in fact present. The means available to the two societies, at least when the external forum is considered, do not suffice to examine every responsibility perfectly. Nevertheless, by taking no interest in it they do not eliminate responsibility among their subjects: it remains intact, as was indicated, before God and partially before the Church in the exercise of its power in the internal forum. On the other hand, it should also be noted that both the Church and the State, likewise in external relations, may demand that their subjects give an account of their conduct even when, objectively speaking, responsibility is lacking in them because of factors that cannot be weighed; in this case, as is obvious, responsibility for the violation of the law attributed to the subject does not exist before God or before conscience. In any event, the attribution of responsibility by society to someone who has been proved legally or factually incapable of it certainly remains unjust. In this connection it is also appropriate to recall that society has the right to establish responsibility only by lawful means; it is never lawful, not even for the State, to resort to means contrary to nature or to common sentiment.

civil means in order to prove to its subjects their possible responsibility, even if, as may happen, by these means it could be established with certainty.