The direct victims of terrorism are innocent in the sense of not being responsible, on any credible understanding of responsibility and liability, for the injustice or oppression the terrorists fight against not responsible at all, or at least not responsible to the degree that makes them liable to be killed or maimed on that account.
The account presupposes a certain understanding of responsibility and liability: a person is responsible for a state of affairs only by virtue of that person's voluntary, i.e., informed and free, act or omission that has a sufficiently strong connection with that state of affairs, and thereby becomes liable to some proportionately unfavorable response.
The second dimension we examine to draw a clear line separating the understanding of responsibility in RRI and neoliberalism is the telos, the purpose of responsible action.
"The understanding of responsibility was very different then," said Steinacher. "People believed that those responsible for the Holocaust were Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels and that others only followed orders.
Now we have a completely different understanding of responsibility".
"If he can fly out of Damascus," Semyon A. Bagdasarov, a Middle East expert in Moscow, said — at this, he laughed dryly — "there is also the understanding of responsibility before the people.
This, too, is a preposterous understanding of responsibility and liability.
These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility.
