Moral Responsibility of Public Officials¶
Thompson, D. F. (1980). Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands. American Political Science Review, 74(4), 905-916.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Responsibility Diffusion
- Concentrated responsibility produces disproportionately higher enforcement than distributed responsibility, an instance of what Thompson (1980) named the "problem of many hands" in the moral responsibility of public officials.
This sourceFoundational governance/ethics treatment of how distributed authority among many officials erodes ascribable responsibility—the "many hands" problem in regulatory and public-sector accountability.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Thompson (1980) supplies the "problem of many hands" — difficulty ascribing moral responsibility when many officials contribute — but says nothing about concentrated versus distributed responsibility producing higher enforcement.
“That many different officials contribute in many different ways to decisions and policies in the modern state makes it difficult to ascribe moral responsibility to any official.”
- Concentrated responsibility produces disproportionately higher enforcement than distributed responsibility, an instance of what Thompson (1980) named the "problem of many hands" in the moral responsibility of public officials.
Mechanisms¶
- Responsibility Diffusion Check
- Its strength is recovering the answerability that genuinely shared settings tend to dissolve — the well-known problem of many hands, where an outcome is produced by so many contributors that no single one seems responsible.
This sourceDefines the problem of many hands as the difficulty of assigning responsibility when many officials contribute to a collective outcome.
- Its strength is recovering the answerability that genuinely shared settings tend to dissolve — the well-known problem of many hands, where an outcome is produced by so many contributors that no single one seems responsible.
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