It is rather that praise and blame can induce people to be more conscientious — to govern their conduct in light of the responsibilities ascribed to them, to act out of a sense of their own responsibility, and thereby to take notice and mastery of the motives by which they act — in the future.
Hence the emphasis that we now see being placed by post-war tribunals on making sure that if collective responsibility is ascribed to particular groups it is ascribed to all groups according to general rules.
According to Cooper, "[t]here is an obvious point to be recognized and that obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons.
It seems that high criticism is characterised by responsibility appraisals ascribed to both positive and negative events.
Ascription of responsibility was examined by asking respondents to rate the level of responsibility they ascribe to various stakeholders (e.g., self, friends and family, local emergency services, neighbors or community members, FEMA) for their personal protection and provision of resources.
We need to figure out how to apportion differential responsibility without ascribing evil intent.
"For New Yorkers," Bradley writes, "it meant that the native cosmopolitanism and the conviction of inherited civic responsibility that they ascribed to Irving's historian could be found at the highest level of government".
A recent European Union report on anti-Semitism in Europe ascribed responsibility for the rising tide of violence against Jews to "young, disaffected white Europeans," a finding that flew in the face of much hard, if politically inconvenient, evidence that it is for the most part the work of Muslim youths.
But after years of being held at the military prison without charge, Defense Department officials recently said that he was in fact a low-level foot soldier to whom they had mistakenly ascribed responsibility for the actions of others whose names or aliases were similar to his own.
