Keep score and punish: Brandom’s concept of responsibility

I. Asserting: A pattern of punishments

Let me begin by recapitulating three general premises of Brandom’s theory of language and normativity.

First, Brandom (MIE 172) argues that asserting is the fundamental discursive practice because making a claim by asserting it is the fundamental move in the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. Hence, I limit my critical analysis of Brandom’s model of linguistic scorekeeping to the practice of asserting.

Second, Brandom is a normativist in that he takes conceptual activity to be irreducibly normative, and a pragmatist in that he wants to explain what is asserted – propositional content – in terms of what one does in the act of asserting it (MIE 157). Hence, we cannot give a reductive account of the practice of asserting in a nonnormative vocabulary to explain how it constitutes normative usage of concepts. Instead, Brandom takes an expressivist route: Concepts and their use in claims make explicit certain norms that are already implicit in our (non-discursive) practices. ⁵

Third, his account of implicit norms in practices is phenomenalistic and retributivistic: We institute normative statuses by treating something or someone as having a certain normative status – hence, normative attitudes have explanatory priority over normative statuses (MIE 25). We can understand normative attitudes as performances that treat other performances as correctly or incorrectly – that is as (positive or negative) sanctions. Yet we must not reduce sanctions to nonnormative behavior because they can be done correctly or incorrectly themselves (MIE 36, 42–44). Although there may be (and usually are) nonnormative (‘external’) sanctions – Brandom’s example is hitting someone with a stick (MIE 43) – there are normative sanctions, too: treating someone as if she has gained (or lost) a certain normative status, for example, granting (or revoking) her permission to participate in certain practices. Sanctions are assessments of performances of other practices that can be done correctly or incorrectly. Therefore, they are themselves normative practices. The normative attitudes they embody institute the normative statuses which are the building blocks for Brandom’s explanation of discursive practices. ⁶ Discursive practices are those social practices which enable us to make explicit their implicit norms: to talk about them.

The practice of asserting is the central discursive practice and Brandom analyses it using two fundamental normative (deontic) statuses: entitlements and commitments. True to his phenomenalistic premise, attributing commitments is the fundamental move; thus undertaking a commitment means entitling others to ascribe that commitment to me. In Brandom’s model of deontic scorekeeping, participants in the discursive practice of asserting are scorekeepers who track their own commitments and entitlements as well as those of others. The normative significance of asserting something can therefore be described by what it changes in the deontic scores (MIE 157–163).

Let me give a somewhat simplified example ⁷ : On Brandom’s account, to assert p is to undertake a commitment to p, namely to entitle others to attribute the commitment to p. This leads to a host of changes in the deontic scores, both for the one committing to p and for the other scorekeepers, because of p’s inferential relations. Brandom distinguishes inferential relations on two levels: On the semantic level, committing to p leads, for example, to losing entitlements to all material incompatible propositions q. On the social pragmatic level, committing to p by asserting it entitles others to repeat p and defer to me when asked for their entitlement to p (testimonial inferences). In other words, when I assert p, I accept having to give reasons for why I am entitled (or even committed) to p. I can do so either by asserting a further proposition r that serves as a premise for p (thereby implicitly committing myself to the inference from r to p), by deferring to someone else’s authority or by referring to my own authority as a ‘reliable noninferential reporter’, that is, as a reliable perceiver (MIE chapter 4.I–4.III). Brandom summarizes his account of the practice of asserting in the following way:

In producing assertions, performers are doing two sorts of things. They are first authorizing further assertions (and the commitments they express), both concomitant commitments on their part (inferential consequences) and claims on the part of their audience (communicational consequences). In doing so, they become responsible in the sense of answerable for their claims. That is, they are also undertaking a specific task responsibility, namely the responsibility to show that they are entitled to the commitment expressed by their assertions, should that entitlement be brought into question. (MIE 173)

Asserting something without the necessary entitlement is a violation of norms in Brandom’s scorekeeping model of discursive practices – which expresses itself by others sanctioning me. These sanctions do not need to be nonnormative ‘external’ sanctions (hitting me with a stick) but can also consist in ‘internal’ sanctions, for example, simply ignoring my assertions. However, since norms are instituted by sanctions, the violation of a norm requires punishment, for otherwise the norm would be (eventually) in danger of losing its validity. Since Brandom conceptualizes discursive norms as being upheld by sanction-backed relations of responsibility, there would be no norms without punishment – and consequently no discursive practices. ⁸

At this point in my reconstruction, we can already draw an interesting inference. If reason and intentionality are conceptual capacities which mark the difference between sapience and sentience (MIE 4 f.) and if conceptual capacities are characterized by their ‘normative character’ (MIE 8), then given that norms are upheld by (normative or nonnormative) sanctions, reason and intentionality are essentially by-products of practices of mutual punishment. What makes us ‘concept-mongering creatures’ (MIE xi) special, then, is our elaborately structured system of mutual punishments which builds an entire system of internal sanctions on top of our external ones, thus creating a whole new playground for our fantasies of how to punish ourselves and others.

We can also already see that ‘responsibility’ plays a fundamental role in Brandom’s account of discursive practices. Asserting practices are simply practices in which normative entitlements and commitments are modified according to the inferential structure outlined above, and Brandom explains commitments as the taking on of responsibility. ⁹ Yet Brandom hardly ever explains his concept of responsibility other than referring back to Kurt Baier’s concept of ‘task-responsibility’ (MIE 172; see also Brandom 1983, 643, 649, fn. 13). ¹⁰ Following this link further strengthens the importance of punishment because Baier develops his notion of responsibility by rationally reconstructing it from a highly idealized account of the criminal proceedings at a court. For Baier, task-responsibility is instrumental to protecting and upholding the social order by legitimating the punishment of those who violate this order. Yet Baier is pessimistic about reaching that goal, because ‘with the decline of Christian moral upbringing, large numbers in our society do not nowadays receive any suitable moral education’ (Baier 1970, 102) which he sees as a necessary prerequisite. It is rather curious that Brandom relies on this morally charged concept of task-responsibility to explain the normative mechanics of discursive practices – though the emphasis on punishment fits nicely in his account of discursivity fueled by sanctions.

Coming back to my first thesis, we begin to see what it means to say that ‘responsibility’ makes explicit the normative force that binds scorekeepers to the inferential structure in which they find themselves entangled. This force is traced back to the internal and external sanctions with which scorekeepers react to other scorekeepers who (in view of the former) do not properly discharge the task-responsibility acquired by their assertions. On this account, being responsible is to have a certain relation to self: a consciousness of one’s own ‘deontic debts’ in the accounts that the other scorekeepers manage. This relation to self is the result of one’s own reflexive scorekeeping. Since I keep an account of my own score and of my own score in the accounts of others, I become aware of my own deontic debts both as I calculate them and as I think others calculate them. To be a subject on Brandom’s view means to be a deontic scorekeeper (MIE 628–631); a being who neither is an account manager nor an enforcer of punishments, if others exceed their credit, cannot count as a rational and intentional being in its own right.

II. Responsibility as a paradigm for normativity

A more graceful expression for the same fact would be that only a being that is made responsible and that holds others responsible can be a discursive being capable of participating in asserting practices and therefore in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Being responsible means being conscious of one’s deontic debts and trying to redeem them. In order to analyze in more detail the kind of subjectivity that Brandom’s concept of responsibility constitutes, we best turn to his Woodbridge lectures ‘Animating Ideas of Idealism. A Semantic Sonata in Kant and Hegel’ (RiP chapters 1–3) in which he presents his own account as a reworking of Kant’s and Hegel’s central ideas in three steps.

Brandom begins (again) with Kant’s insight into the normative character of conceptual activity: ‘What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for’ (RiP 32). This conceptual responsibility has four relata: who is responsible to whom, for what and by which activity. With Brandom’s Kant being a pragmatist avant la lettre, it is the activity by which one becomes responsible that should explain the other relata.

Here we find, according to Brandom, ‘Kant’s next big idea’ (RiP 35), namely to understand responsibility as a task-responsibility to integrate the judgment into the ‘original synthetic unity of apperception’. The responsibility acquired in the act of judging demands producing and sustaining one’s self by fitting the judgment’s content to one’s prior judgements. It has three components: a critical responsibility to eliminate material incompatibilities between the judgements one is committed to; an ampliative responsibility to extract all inferences to new commitments and entitlements from those judgements; and a justificatory responsibility to give reasons for those judgements, should they be challenged. The resulting self aims at a consistent, complete and warranted set of judgements (RiP 36). Already at this deep level, the subjectivity connected to task-responsibility is therefore characterized by three imperatives: consistency within a self that cannot tolerate contradictions; self-transparency, because the self must strive to know all ramifications of its commitments; and certainty, since it must know all its commitments to be warranted.

Brandom takes the second step with Hegel, arguing for the social dimension of the attributions of task-responsibility. (Brandom’s) Kant takes judgments to be commitments which make me responsible to whom I choose, because according to the ‘autonomy-conception’ of normativity, I am bound only by those norms that I recognize as binding. The problem is that now the distinction between what I am bound to and what I take myself to be bound to collapses. ¹¹ (Brandom’s) Hegel solves the problem with his ‘recognition-conception’ of normativity:

What institutes normative statuses is reciprocal recognition. Someone becomes responsible only when others hold him responsible, and exercises authority only when others acknowledge that authority. […] So the process that synthesizes an apperceiving normative subject […] is a social process of reciprocal recognition that at the same time synthesizes a normative recognitive community of those recognized by and who recognize that normative subject: a community bound together by reciprocal relations of authority over and responsibility to each other. (RiP 70)

Brandom’s third and final step also comes from Hegel and answers the now pressing question how the social process of recognizing the responsibilities incurred through judgements relates to the free activity of producing and sustaining the self by integrating judgements. Kant separates sharply between given concepts and their application; only the latter activity draws me into the game of mutual responsibilities. Hegel understands the creation and the application of concepts as a single social and historical process instead. Past usages of a concept determine its current propositional content but every usage reinterprets this content which is therefore never conclusively fixed. Brandom explains this hermeneutic spiral with the analogy to a common law judge: Although she is bound to precedent cases, it is her decision which cases count as precedent for the current case. Yet her decision is not arbitrary because she must justify it by rationally reconstructing the norms in light of which the precedent cases become relevant for her present case (RiP 81–94). According to Brandom, this is structurally identical with Hegel’s historical process in which conceptual content is determined: Using a certain concept means accepting the responsibility to justify this usage by rationally reconstructing previous usages, and it means authorizing others to use the concept in the same way.

As in Making It Explicit, ‘responsibility’ is the leitmotiv of Brandom’s ‘semantic sonata in Kant and Hegel’ (RiP 25), and the subjectivity produced and sustained by ‘responsibility’ is structured around deontic debts: Whether it appears as one of the three types of responsibility in Kant’s integration of judgements into the original synthetic unity of apperception or as the social and historical process of mutual recognition between equal concept-mongers who authorize each other to hold them responsible, the ‘relation to self’ that ‘responsibility’ constitutes is the consciousness of having deontic debts. Failure to pay them off must result in (normative or nonnormative) sanctions. With regard to my second thesis, we see how the binding force of norms is made explicit with the concept of responsibility as being bound by deontic debts that license punishment unless redeemed. It seems exceptionally fitting that after the model of deontic scorekeeping, Brandom introduces the legal model of a common law judge to explicate the discursive practices of using concepts, for it emphasizes the link between moral and legal guilt (Schuld) and economic debt (Schulden) – the very nexus in which, according to Nietzsche (GM II/8, 45), the technique of subjectivation called ‘responsibility’ is firmly rooted.

III. Moralization, juridification, and economization

Yet Brandom’s concept of (task-)responsibility does not just have moral, legal and economic connotations (responsibility, punishment, debts), it charges the very structure of normativity with their respective imperatives – or so I announced in my third thesis. My argument supporting this claim has three steps, the first of which is to better understand the centrality of the place accorded to ‘responsibility’. The concept makes explicit, as we have already seen, the binding force of the inferential structure that constitutes discursivity. Conceptual normativity is the most fundamental form of binding force in Brandom’s philosophy – not in the sense of ‘most basic’ but in the sense that conceptual normativity is the first self-sufficient form of normativity. Taking a community to be able to engage in linguistic practices is to accord to its members ‘original intentionality’ independent of my attribution (MIE 630 f.). Hence, conceptual normativity is the kind of normativity from which all other forms can be elaborated: it is explanatory primary, and by making explicit conceptual normativity’s force, ‘responsibility’ makes explicit normative force in general.

One might object that ‘responsibility’ makes explicit only a part of normativity’s force, since Brandom uses the concepts of authority or entitlement as well as the concepts of responsibility or commitment, arguing that both are needed because otherwise one would have to presuppose the concept of formal negation. This, however, would contradict his expressive theory of logic in which formal negation is arrived at by substitution from material incompatibility – which is in turn defined with the help of the concepts of commitment and entitlement: ‘Two claims are incompatible with each other if commitment to one precludes entitlement to the other’ (MIE 160). Doesn’t this mean that ‘responsibility’ can account for only one half of normativity’s force?

However, this is not the case; normative force is exclusively explained by means of responsibility. According to Brandom’s phenomenalism, being entitled to a claim must be understood in terms of the attribution of that entitlement, of taking someone to be entitled to that claim. Yet the force of attributing an entitlement is accounted for in terms of the task-responsibility thereby incurred. The force of all attributions instituting normative statuses is depended on the mutual punishments which institute all norms, and ‘responsibility’ is the concept used to make explicit the structure of these practices of (normative and nonnormative) punishments: the binding force of norms upon us. Thus, although ‘responsibility’ and ‘authority’ or ‘commitment’ and ‘entitlement’ are semantically on equal footing in the explanation of the semantic inferential relations, ‘responsibility’ is pragmatically the more fundamental concept. If ‘inference’ is the concept that accounts for conceptual content, ‘responsibility’ explicates normative force.

For the second step in my argument, we must remember that ‘making explicit’ is the central practice of Brandom’s philosophy. He distinguishes between three levels on which something is made explicit ¹² : On the first, discursive practices make explicit the normative statuses which are implicitly conferred within our (discursive and non-discursive) practices. Participants can, thanks to the inferential structure of those practices, not just do something but actually say what they are doing (or take themselves to be doing). In this weak sense, all linguistic performances are acts of ‘making it explicit’. ¹³ On the second level, philosophers can make explicit the inferential structure which practices need to count as discursive (that is: explicating) practices (MIE xviii–xx). On the third level, interpreting a community as engaged in discursive practices requires logical vocabulary to make their semantic relations explicit. The paradigmatic case is the conditional that enables us to explicate the inferential structure of a practice that treats certain inferences as materially correct ones. Logical vocabulary gives us the resources needed to talk about the implicit inferential structures that are the mark of discursive practices. Hence, logic is ‘the organ of semantic self-consciousness’ (MIE xix). This third level is self-explicating: If a philosopher can give an account of those practices that are strong enough to be not just discursive practices but allow using logical, modal and normative vocabulary, then these practices are the ones that the philosopher herself is engaged in. As a result, she achieves what Brandom calls ‘expressive completeness’ (MIE 641, 649 f.; 2008, chapter 2).

Philosophy itself is, in Brandom’s view, nothing but this activity of making ourselves explicit as those beings that make explicit. He emphasizes that this is a form of critical or transformative conceptual analysis. Philosophy develops vocabularies that allow us to say something that before we could only do. Making explicit thereby changes what we can do, since once we can say what we do, we can reason about it – we gain ‘expressive freedom’ (RiP 150). Hence, philosophers ‘are charged neither with simply understanding human nature (human history), nor with simply changing it, but with changing it by understanding it’ (RiP 151). Therefore, making explicit normativity’s force with the concept of responsibility transforms how we can (and cannot) talk and think about normativity.

Yet is does more than that. The third step of my argument is to apply this understanding of philosophy as an activity that transforms us by making us explicit to Brandom’s enterprise. Using ‘responsibility’ to make explicit normativity’s force transforms our understanding of normativity in a very specific way, I argue, namely by moralizing, juridifying and economizing normativity. With this last step, my third thesis will be vindicated.

On first sight, it is hardly surprising that making explicit the binding force of normativity with the concept of responsibility leads to a moralized understanding of normativity. Considering Brandom’s reliance on Kurt Baier’s moral concept of task-responsibility, how could it be otherwise? Furthermore, remember that the core of Brandom’s ‘expressive account of language, mind, and logic’ (MIE 650) consists in the practice of asserting which is understood as a game of being and holding others responsible cashed out in mutual (normative and nonnormative) punishments. No wonder normativity understood from within this picture is moralized (and juridified) through and through.

Yet since Brandom claims that his normativity is not moral but a ‘thinner’, conceptual normativity, ¹⁴ a further argument is required – and generously supplied by the kind of subjectivity Brandom’s concept of responsibility produces and sustains. As we saw in his reconstruction of Kant and Hegel, the responsible subject emerging from the discursive practices is characterized by consistency, self-transparency and certainty as the three imperatives of Brandom’s task-responsibility. Yet these are precisely those imperatives Nietzsche thinks are the mark of moral subjects who have to be made regular, necessary and reliable by the ‘straight-jacket’ he calls the ‘morality of custom’ (GM II/2, 36). Brandom’s conceptual normativity made explicit by ‘responsibility’ inevitably infuses these three moral imperatives into even the most basic subjectivity and structures it according to the form of subjectivity the concept of task-responsibility creates: around the consciousness of deontic debts.

Notice that without this relation to self that is constituted by Brandom’s concept of (task)responsibility, his account of normativity would be reducible to nonnormatively describable sanctions. For without presupposing a subjectivity that is perpetually concerned about its deontic debts, all normative sanctions would lose their force. Furthermore, the three imperatives are not merely epistemological because they are socially enforced requirements of being recognized as a member of the community of concept-users and thus acquire existential meaning: no subject could abandon them without risking its existence as a subject. Thus, we are justified in attributing the moralization of normativity and of all concepts made explicit within its framework to Brandom.

If we take a second look at Brandom’s concept of task-responsibility as a form of being conscious on one’s one deontic debts (well taken care of by the three imperatives), we see that keeping score and punishing are the two most basic practices that turn us into subjects. Normativity is explicated not just in moralizing, but in economizing and juridifying terms as well. At this point, Brandom’s happy Hegelian history turns into a twisted tale of Nietzschean terror: If the philosopher makes explicit her own practices by using the concept of responsibility, she makes them explicit as a complex of punishing and accounting practices, as a combination of cruelty and calculation. Brandom’s explication of normativity in terms of ‘responsibility’ turns this nexus of legal and economic practices of punishing and accounting into that which most fundamentally binds us and makes us the subjects we are. Furthermore, by leaving the concept of responsibility almost completely unexplained, Brandom effectively hides this fact, although it has great effects: For if philosophy is indeed a practice that transforms us by making us explicit, Brandom’s making us explicit in terms of ‘responsibility’ intensifies our own moralization, juridification and economization.

IV. Brandom, Nietzsche and the history of ‘responsibility’

The critique just leveled against the effects of Brandom’s account of normativity that explicates normativity’s force through ‘responsibility’ is limited in two ways. First, it is not a critique of normativity per se but of a specific account of normativity that uses ‘responsibility’ as the key concept to understand and explicate normativity. Second, so far it is tied very specifically to Brandom’s concept of responsibility. In this final section, I will broaden the critique only with respect to the second limitation. For my fourth and final thesis suggests that Brandom’s usage of ‘responsibility’ as a moralizing, juridifying and economizing paradigm of normativity is not a regrettable exception in the history of philosophical reflections on and with ‘responsibility’ but regrettably is exemplary for this history’s trajectory. Since I cannot hope to survey that intricate history here (see my attempt in Vogelmann 2017b), I offer evidence for that claim via a diagnostic reading of Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’. ¹⁵ It shows us the blueprint of the two interconnected trajectories that further developments of ‘responsibility’ in philosophy have taken. I call my interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy ‘diagnostic’ because it does not try to overcome the conceptual ambivalence in Nietzsche’s analysis and usage of ‘responsibility’ but takes this ambivalence to belong to the insights that Nietzsche’s genealogy has to offer. On this basis, I will show the structural identity of the relation to self that Brandom’s concept of responsibility constitutes and the ambivalent relation to self that Nietzsche’s genealogy uncovers. With respect to this identity, I argue, Brandom’s usage of ‘responsibility’ is no exception from the history of ‘responsibility’ in philosophy – and I will suggest that the ambivalent relation to self that is constituted by ‘responsibility’ can be used to understand this history.

For Nietzsche, ‘responsibility’ is both the means to ‘breed an animal with the prerogative to promise’ (GM II/1, 35) and the crowning achievement of that task. One obstacle encountered by this ‘prehistoric labour’ (GM II/2, 36) is the active force of forgetfulness – which pain, that ancient technique of mnemonics, easily overcomes. ¹⁶ Yet pain is not sufficient to conquer our unpredictability and make ourselves ‘reliable, regular, necessary, even in [our] own self-image’ (GM II/2, 36). According to Nietzsche, ‘bad consciousness’ does the trick – but is itself a tricky business as it grows out of the protracted relation between ‘guilt [Schuld]’ and ‘debt [Schulden]’. Punishment – making those suffer who cannot settle their debts and therefore pay by giving their creditors the enjoyment of entitled cruelty – is a crucial first element. Yet punishment alone just hardens the minds and hearts of those punished (GM II/4–14, 39–55).

A second element necessary to develop bad consciousness is the inversion of the will to power: ‘this instinct of freedom forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself: that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings’ (GM II/16, 58). The blockage must have happened, Nietzsche (GM II/17, 58 f.) speculates, by an external force. ¹⁷ If I cannot exercise my will to power in the world because others prevent me from doing so, then this active force in search of someone to torment turns inward to torture the only target available: me. Thus, the human ‘soul’ is born, and with it the ‘feeling of guilt’ or ‘bad consciousness’ (GM II/16–19, 56–61).

Still, memory created through pain and a rich inner life born from self-torture do not yet yield the regularity and predictability Nietzsche thinks are required for a promising animal. Bad consciousness must, thirdly, be moralized by interpreting one’s inner torment as a deserved punishment although that means interpreting oneself as irrevocably guilty. Nietzsche calls this self-understanding mad, a ‘madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself guilty and condemned without hope of reprieve’ (GM II/22, 64). Yet this madness brings calculability and predictability because it makes the internalized will to power fully decipherable: each self-inflicted cruelty now corresponds to one’s guilt. The resulting sovereign individual has thus acquired the self-mastery necessary for having the right to make promises:

[…] in short, we find a man with his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise – and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated, an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion. (GM II/2, 37)

Interpreters of Nietzsche often dissolve the ambivalence of this relation to self constituted by responsibility (that stems from the ambivalence of subjugation) by separating two different concepts of responsibility, namely the responsibility used as a technique of subjectivation to create sovereign subjects and the responsibility these sovereigns acquire. ¹⁹ This enables them to argue that out of Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘old’ responsibility emerge the contours of a ‘new’ responsibility. Yet such readings must presuppose that the ‘prehistoric labour’, once done, is over (against which Nietzsche remarks that it ‘exists at all times or could possibly re-occur’, see GM II/9, 46) and that we can enjoy the ‘ripest fruit’ without letting it actually ‘ripening’. Furthermore, these interpretations have to understand the sovereign individual as the ethical ideal that Nietzsche advocates (see e.g. Owen 2002; Ridley 1998, 142–146; Stegmaier 1994, 136–138), a claim that Christa Davis Acampora (2006) and Laurence Hatab (2008, 75–85; 1995, 37 f.) have forcefully attacked. ²⁰ They argue that the ‘sovereign individual’ is not Nietzsche’s new ethical ideal but the ideal of liberal democracy that Nietzsche criticizes. The ‘sovereign individual’, in other words, belongs to the ‘last human beings’, blinking happily (Nietzsche 2006, 10).

While I am sympathetic to this more critical reading of Nietzsche, I think we should rather hold on to the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s concept of responsibility. According to my reconstruction of Nietzsche’s genealogy outlined above, Nietzsche exposes the structure of responsibility’s relation to self as the activity of coming to terms with the ambivalent fact of subjugation: the fact of being subjugated and the fact of subjugating oneself. Separating two concepts of ‘responsibility’ would deny the genealogical insight that the ‘social straightjacket’ (GM II/2, 36) of ‘responsibility’ is required to form the subjectivity of the sovereign individual with the ‘privilege of responsibility’ (GM II/2, 37). ²¹ Retaining rather than resolving the ambivalence allows us to exploit Nietzsche’s diagnostic insight as a map to the history of moral reflections on ‘responsibility’ in philosophy, all of which revolve around the ambivalent fact of subjugation. Nietzsche’s exposure of the structure of responsibility’s relation to self as dealing with the ambivalent fact of subjugating offers us a diagnostic tool to understand why the development of moral reflections on ‘responsibility’ in the history of philosophy forms two different yet inseparable strands. On the one hand, putting the focus on ‘responsibility’ as dealing with the fact of oneself subjugating others leads to positions which take ‘responsibility’ to express the obligations incurred by one’s own power to subjugate (see e.g. Jonas 1984; Weber 2004). On the other hand, positions that focus on ‘responsibility’ as dealing with the fact of being subjugated tend to emphasize a ‘responsive’ dimension of responsibility, namely the obligation to respond to the claims the world and others make on us (see e.g. Butler 2005; Levinas 1981; Waldenfels 2012; Weischedel 1972). Yet none of these positions is able to fully rid itself of the respective other side of the ambivalent fact of subjugating. ‘Accountability’ as the responsibility resulting from my own subjugating others is usually connected to my experience of being subjugated and the demands I therefore make on those subjugating me (again, see e.g. Jonas 1984, 98; Weber 2004, 262). Analogously, understanding ‘responsibility’ as the duty to respond to the demands of others that subjugate me includes the insight that they are in turn necessitated to respond to my demands subjugating them (Waldenfels 2012, 430 f.; and with more details in Waldenfels 2006, 165). ²²

Three conclusions can be drawn from Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’ if we understand it diagnostically in the sense just proposed. First, we are now in position to recognize the structural identity of responsibility’s relation to self in Brandom’s account of normativity and in Nietzsche’s genealogy. Notice that in each, ‘responsibility’ fulfills the same task. In Brandom’s implicit description of responsible subjects, they need to keep score of their (and others’) deontic debts and punish those who fail to redeem them because only score-keeping and punishing creatures can normatively bind themselves – only they have the capability and the right to promise. Their ‘inner life’ revolves around deontic debts and the guilt of not having serviced them, driven by the three imperatives of consistency, self-transparency and certainty. Seen from the inside, these imperatives are the motor for keeping score of my deontic debts and those of others as well as punishing me and others for not redeeming them. As a Brandomian subject, I am constantly dealing with the fact that I need to punish others and that I will be punished by others, that I need to subjugate and that I will be subjugated – all according to my and others’ accounting of our deontic debts. Thus, the three imperatives are precisely the directives of a subjectivity whose relation to self is constituted by dealing with the ambivalent fact of one’s own subjugating, in the double sense of being subjugated and of subjugating others. The relation to self that Brandom’s concept of responsibility fosters is premised on the unquestioned acceptance of subjugating; it makes us engage with ourselves in an activity that takes our subjugating others and our being subjugated by others as a fact not to be questioned but to be dealt with. ²³

Second, I can now vindicate my fourth thesis that Brandom’s concept of ‘responsibility’ is not a deplorable exception but exemplary for our understanding of ‘responsibility’. The structural identity of the responsible subject’s relation to self in Nietzsche’s and Brandom’s account powerfully confirms Nietzsche’s diagnostic insight into the history of ‘responsibility’. In a way, Brandom ‘merely’ makes explicit how ‘responsibility’ has come to be used in philosophy generally, and his moralization of normativity is simply a consequence of what our explication of ourselves in terms of ‘responsibility’ does. Analyzing Brandom’s use of ‘responsibility’ to understand language and normativity thus allows us to get into view a contemporary paradigm in philosophy build on responsibility’s problematic relation to self that is essentially structured around an unquestioned objectification of subjugating. If Brandom’s account of normativity serves as a conceptual foundation for quite a lot of undertakings in critical theory today, as I argued in the beginning, then uncovering the moralizing, juridifying and economizing consequences of making explicit normativity’s force with ‘responsibility’ poses an uncomfortable question for these projects: How deeply implicated are they in an understanding of normativity that accounts for normativity’s binding force only by conceptualizing score-keeping and punishing subjects whose relations to self are premised on objectifying subjugating into an unquestioned fact? And how could they free themselves from this spell of ‘responsibility’?

The third conclusion is that a critique of the concept of responsibility will hardly be effective if we merely substitute one particular conception of responsibility for another while remaining within the structure of responsibility’s relation to self that Nietzsche’s genealogy exposes. Understanding Nietzsche diagnostically, I have said, holds on to both sides of his genealogy and thus to the ambivalent relation to self that structures the moral concept of responsibility in philosophy. A critical implication of appreciating Nietzsche’s exposure of this ambivalence as a diagnostic insight is that neither of the positions in the two strands of developing ‘responsibility’ – that I have sketched above as thinking ‘responsibility’ in terms of ‘accountability’ and ‘responsiveness’ – can claim to have broken with the classical concept of responsibility, as they remain firmly within the structure of the relation to self that, as Nietzsche’s shows, defines ‘responsibility’. Thus, the distinction between a ‘forensic’ and a ‘responsive’ responsibility so popular in critical approaches to ‘responsibility’ (see e.g. Assadi 2013; Lavin 2008; Raffoul 2010; Thiem 2008) is merely part of the relation to self that consists in dealing with the ambivalent fact of being subjugated and of subjugating others.

Hence, as I announced in the beginning, a critique of ‘responsibility’ must be radical and negativistic in order to unsettle the dangerously self-evident explication of normativity through ‘responsibility’. Yet notice that my critique is carefully limited to this particular paradigm of understanding normativity’s force by way of ‘responsibility’. It is not a critique of normativity per se but of what has become an unquestioned generalization of ‘responsibility’ that ignores the moralization, juridification and economization which it furthers. My negativistic critique of Brandom’s explication of normative force through ‘responsibility’ thus lays bare a problematic reliance on a concept – ‘responsibility’ – in critical theory (and beyond) that all too often is presumed to be too important to engage in a radical critique of it. Yet critical theory cannot afford to turn a blind eye to ‘responsibility’ out of fear what it might discover in this beloved concept. Nor should it reject a negativistic critique because it does not (yet) offer a replacement. Negativistic critique certainly has not the final word – but sometimes it needs the first word in order to disturb us from our uncritical slumber and force us to rethink even our basic concepts. My aim here has been to show, that in order to stop turning subjugating into the unquestioned fact on which our subjectivities are constituted, we have to break free from the concept of responsibility. We need to seek a way beyond responsibility and irresponsibility – and thus beyond shockingly attractive accounts like Brandom’s seemingly innocent philosophy of language that understands us via a moralizing, juridifying and economizing explication of normativity and thereby changes – moralizes, juridifies and economizes – us. Unless, of course, we are content to keep score and punish.