“Responsibility for everything or the inertia of responsibility?” Towards moderation – some phenomenological reflections.

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of radical responsibility understood as responsibility towards(for) everything (pan-responsibility). The dissertation assumes that responsibility is a personal, relational being towards an appealing externality. Using the components of the concept of moral happening – in the perspective of the phenomenological paradigm – the possibility of concretizing the idea of ​​pan-responsibility (an idea in the Ingarden sense) is considered and applied to selected elements of environmental ethics.

An explication of the title question leads to the conclusion that pan-responsibility in its extreme version results in internal aporia, which means the inability of man to meet the standards of responsibility towards(for) everything. This is expressed by the inertia of responsibility (in the form of omission and destruction of specific entities, or moral demotivation). However, pan-responsibility in a mild version is possible (and desirable), when the scheme according to the capabilities of the personal subject, which is an important correlate of the category of moderation, is taken into account. Reflection on the importance of moderation simultaneously reveals the connections between responsibility and anthropological, epistemological, ethical and metaphysical components.