The Concept of Responsibility and Determinants of Responsibility Judgment in the Japanese Context

As in the case of the English word responsibility, the Japanese equivalent sekinin is an over-used term with multiple meanings. At least two distinctive usages are noted for the Japanese concept of responsibility: 1) to describe duties or obligations pertaining to a person's role or position; and 2) to assign blame or sanction to someone when an untoward occurrence is observed. By utilizing a number of peculiar incidents that resulted in some harm, the present study has found that subjects' responsibility judgments in terms of the second type of usage were largely determined by the following two factors: 1) the causal relationship of the agent's act to the harm that ensued; and 2) the morality of the act itself without regard to consequences. In the cases where these two aspects contradicted, especially where the blameworthy act was not directly connected to the harm, judgments about the agent's responsibility were found to diverge among subjects. It was also shown that subjects most often referred to these aspects in elucidating the reasons for attributing responsibility to, or negating the responsibility of, the agent.