Three Forms of Responsibility: On the Relationship between Tort Law and the Welfare State

This article rejects the position that individual responsibility and collective responsibility are opposing and incompatible points of view about how to deal with misfortune. It proposes that we should distinguish between two forms of individual responsibility. One form of individual responsibility, the “social view”, is not just compatible with collective responsibility, it also cannot be attacked without simultaneously attacking collective responsibility. The other view of individual responsibility, the “asocial view”, is indeed incompatible with collective responsibility, but it is equally incompatible with the social view of individual responsibility. The distinction allows us to understand collective responsibility as lifting the burden of individual responsibility to compensate others we have harmed, rather than as lifting the burden of looking after oneself, and thus better illuminates the relationship between the welfare state and tort law than the conventional view.