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Negative Responsibility and Utilitarianism

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Negative Responsibility and Utilitarianism
Negative responsibility is the concept that one is equally responsible for not preventing a bad action as one would've been for carrying out that same action him/herself.
In Williams' writing, he gives the example of George, a chemist. George is very physically limited in the jobs he can do causing his wife to go out and work to support the family. A colleague offers George a job as a chemist in a lab that produces chemical and biological weapons. George is very much opposed to such instruments of warfare and initially refuses the job. His colleague goes on to say that he is not an advocate of such weapons either, but that his refusal to take the job would not stop such research from being done and the resultant weapons from being manufactured. Quite to the contrary, if he were not to take the job, another chemist who is not bound by such moral concerns would be appointed who would pursue such research with much greater zeal than George would. According to the concept of negative responsibility, George is responsible for not preventing this just as much as he would be if he were to carry out the research with such zeal himself.
This concept is supposed to be a problem for Utilitarianism in that it is overly impartial and only considers end results and not the agent, per se. Williams argues that such moral theories overreach the bounds a theory should and fail to take into consideration the bond between one's intentions, actions, and projects. Utilitarianism forces one to take responsibility for what others do and not just what we do and this is very unsettling for Williams. He finds it an overly cold, rational, and impartial moral theory that does not effectively capture the human element of morality.

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