Accountability and Community

Abstract

This thesis will start with the idea that accountability constitutes communities. This claim is based on Robert Brandom’s idea that to hold someone accountable for what she says and does, includes this person in a “virtual community”. This person is “one of us”. With this thought in mind, the notion of accountability will be explored, followed by a discussion on the problem of “attributive injustice”, the injustice of misattributing a certain status to someone. One form of attributive injustice is “epistemic injustice”, as it is described by Miranda Fricker. People who suffer from attributive injustice concerning accountability, suffer from what can be called an “accountability deficit” – a term derived from Fricker’s “credibility deficit”, i.e., the notion that one suffers from prejudices when providing testimony of one’s knowledge. A specific type of attributive injustice, concerning the misattribution of willpower, can be called “volitional injustice”. People who suffer from this type of injustice are being regarded as having either a stronger will or a weaker will than they actually have. The focus here lies on the latter. Possible solutions to attributive injustice, the topic of the last section, are to make implicit attributive injustice explicit, so it can be contested. For this, one needs to become sensible for cases in which the prejudice on someone’s accountability is not compatible with other facts about that person.