# Contested concept: responsibility

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: The disagreement is whether moral responsibility can be sustained by appeals to conscience or only by enforced institutions, which determines education versus coercion.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/responsibility` (data: `/concept/responsibility.json`)

## Senses in use
- **Product of definite social arrangements with sanctions, i.e. coercion** — used in 4 claim(s)
- **Voluntary conscience-based duty (responsible parenthood), merely exhortation** — used in 4 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [Responsibility [the word, used in place of a substantial quid pro quo] is an attempt to get something for nothing.](/claim/claim_4c65ad3a8acf.md) _(sense: Voluntary conscience-based duty (responsible parenthood), merely exhortation)_
- [The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.](/claim/claim_5a7ec3dd2b16.md) _(sense: Product of definite social arrangements with sanctions, i.e. coercion)_
- ["Responsibility," says [the philosopher Charles Frankel], "is the product of definite social arrangements."](/claim/claim_758b4085bf4e.md) _(sense: Product of definite social arrangements with sanctions, i.e. coercion)_
- [Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements t…](/claim/claim_7a2369d7209a.md) _(sense: Product of definite social arrangements with sanctions, i.e. coercion)_
- ["Responsibility," says the philosopher Charles Frankel, "is the product of definite social arrangements."](/claim/claim_7ae13cc6cd99.md) _(sense: Product of definite social arrangements with sanctions, i.e. coercion)_
- [The word responsibility, in the context of 'responsible parenthood' and propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into breeders, is me…](/claim/claim_a9a997cfd7d2.md) _(sense: Voluntary conscience-based duty (responsible parenthood), merely exhortation)_
- [When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions, we are trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting …](/claim/claim_cc64f9cac398.md) _(sense: Voluntary conscience-based duty (responsible parenthood), merely exhortation)_
- [At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation mus…](/claim/claim_cf86b20d7688.md) _(sense: Voluntary conscience-based duty (responsible parenthood), merely exhortation)_