"If we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could, you know, bill them; you know, we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons," he was quoted as saying in Edinburgh.
Only last week, for example, Mr Yeltsin had to intervene to persuade the Duma of the need to end three months of squabbling and back a budget for 1998 on first reading.The president also has a vast Kremlin "apparatus", a sort of parallel government accountable to nobody but himself.
Alas, as Plato tells us, paraphrased by Gutting, truth arises "only from the right sort of discussion among inquirers accountable to one another".
In some African countries attitudes have slowly begun to shift away from the backing of "big men" towards a more accountable sort of democracy.Yet South Africa struggles, for all that.
But Haidt's view here is not at all alien to Plato, who saw truth arising only from the right sort of discussion among inquirers accountable to one another.
"Getting high was the only good thing that I had in my life!" But then he saw the biker living a different sort of life: he was accountable, he was honest, he was generous.
We believe the industry is in a position to establish the sort of tough new system of independent, accountable press regulation with the power to investigate wrongdoing and levy fines, envisaged by the report.
As Watson points out, it may make no sense to hold the agent responsible for the action in question, since it may not be the sort of thing for which they are accountable to us.
Failure to perform an act that increases utility, however, is not the right sort of thing for which to hold someone accountable (see Darwall 2006, especially the discussion of Reid in Ch. 8; see also Wolterstorff 2010).
