Some General Results on Responsibility for Outcomes

This paper examines the conditions under which we can hold the members of some committee responsible for the outcome resulting from the committee's decision making process. First, we establish the conditions under which we can be sure that there is at least one member who can thus be held responsible. Formulated differently, we examine the conditions that ensure the absence of `responsibility voids'. Next the focus is on the circumstances in which moral responsibility can always be reduced to causal efficacy, in the sense that a person is morally responsible for the realization of some state of affairs if, and only if, he made a causal contribution to that realization. Finally, it is shown that the only games in which responsibility always coincides with causal efficacy and in which a person is always either fully responsible or not responsible at all, are dictatorial ones.