Responsibility Assignment Narrative

In "Entheogens, Society & Law:Towards a Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy & Responsibility" (Waterman and Hardison, Melrose, 2013) postulate "Responsibility Assignment" as an element of communication representing an often covert attempt on behalf of an interested party to avoid responsibility or blame. The "Responsibility Assignment Narrative" thus belongs to a subset of features identified by Critical Discourse Analysis.

Responsibility Assignment Narrative: Definition

In a 2010 paper focusing on drug policy, Waterman and Hardison identify an element of communication concerned with assigning responsibility i.e. the arrangement of facts and events into narrative forms that wittingly or unwittingly propose logical, plausible and/or inevitable relationships between intentions, causes and outcomes. These narratives often construct outcomes as beyond the control of certain interested parties and/or resulting directly from their intentions and/or conduct and represent a series of a priori assumptions, beliefs or ideological commitments, concerning the inherent nature of certain features of the natural world, including human behavior. Examination of the way responsibility is assigned by narratives may lead to greater awareness about why certain explanatory models fail to predict expected outcomes as well as enhance our ability to see possibilities.

"Our analysis reveals how RANs, expressive of beliefs and assumptions about causality and morality, play an integral role in [ ] explanatory models.[ ] experience bears out that [ ] explanatory models are often presented as predictive tools, even though they ‘are [rarely if ever] predictive of consequent behavior’ (Sargent & Johnson, 1996: 123) or outcomes." (Waterman & Hardison, 2010).

RAN proposes that the failure of explanatory models as predictive tools can frequently be traced to the way in which the interest of assigning moral or causal responsibility dictates narrative organization. Hardison and Waterman have specifically applied these ideas to drug policy and yet they can be applied in many fields of endeavor:

"Unfortunately, a significant factor often overlooked by those considering [e.g.] the failure of drug policy is the general aim of deflecting or assigning responsibility away from the policy-makers and the ‘moral-majority.’ This despite the frequency with which the desire to avoid blame, or taking responsibility, impacts individual and collective preferences for specific explanatory models in other areas. That this principle can become a mainstay of institutional responses to persistent humanitarian and ethical crises is hardly surprising, but any policy concerned with effective implementation of measures impacting or interfering with the private and self-defining choices of individuals ought, in our opinion, to stand up to the same scrutiny that it subjects individual behavior to: if we want individuals to take responsibility we must first establish a rational, effective and empowering way to separate individual responsibility from that of the collective. The RAN analysis allows us to evaluate the effectiveness and predictiveness of a causal explanation, or its lack of predictiveness, by exposing interests that may directly conflict with the intended outcome, e.g. avoidance of responsibility where acknowledging some form of responsibility might be more effective as a means of procuring the intended outcome." (Waterman & Hardison, 2010).

Categories of Causal Agency and/or Moral Responsibility shaping RAN analysis

RAN analysis of explanatory models identifies three categories of causal agency and/or moral responsibility:

• Impersonal causal agency is assigned to inanimate objects, conditions and/or phenomena beyond human control, e.g. drugs are bad, the drug killed him;
• Personal/individual causal and/or moral agency is attributed to individuals or well-defined social minorities, e.g. drug users, drop-outs, deviants, anti-social elements, criminals—terms denoting particular classes of people and constituting explanatory models of themselves; and
• Societal causal and/or moral responsibility is assigned to social/political/ economic/environmental/historical conditions that are either nobody’s responsibility or a collective moral responsibility as when they can be attributed to specific articles of law or injustices.

This list suggests that different, and sometimes conflicting interests shape different parties preferences for specific explanatory models and RANs. A particular RAN is concerned with the question to what degree approval and implementation of an explanatory model minimizing collective or institutional responsibility for certain problems and emphasizing individual responsibility promotes detrimental perceptions and behaviors among individuals, who adopt and adapt similar explanations to justify their own lack of responsibility. For instance, admissibility of diminished responsibility arguments in criminal sentencing can be viewed as a direct consequence of a broader public acceptance of explanatory models purporting to prove a direct relationship between pharmacology, mental health and/or diminished ability to function. According to Waterman and Hardison;

"Our RAN analysis will empower and enable our interest: acknowledgment of a collective responsibility for preventing, minimizing or eliminating drug use related harm, acknowledgment of the fundamental principles of human rights and individual’s sovereign right in self-defining choices, acknowledgment of the boundaries that separate individual rights from those of the state, and acknowledgment of the possibility of responding effectively to ethical and humanitarian crises such as those linked to consumption of psychoactive substances without infringing individual rights."

The way causal agency and/or responsibility is assigned appears crucial to an explanatory model’s ability to engage and empower. Since the question of responsibility is also fundamental to the fairness of the criminal justice system, (e.g. in proportionate sentencing) it is essential that we examine what interests are served and what benefits derive from interpreting causal or moral responsibility in particular ways." (Waterman & Hardison, 2010).

Relationship to Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice. Scholars working in the tradition of CDA generally argue that (non-linguistic) social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. Accordingly, Waterman and Hardison propose that "Responsibility Assignment" which can refer to both social and liguistic practice represents one of the ways in which power relations are created and reinforced.

Responsibility Assignment Narrative: Example

CDA proposes that we pay special attention to social hierarchy and power when trying to understand claims about reality and truth. Proponents of the method argue that we cannot properly understand such claims without asking who says what, in what context and why?

Take for instance the sentence "drugs are bad". CDA proposes that to fully understand this sentence we need to account for the word "drugs" and why it is used instead of e.g. medicines, poisons or magical substances, all of which are used interchangeably throughout the discourse.

Furthermore, we need to ask what the word "bad" actually refers to in this statement and inquire into the specific set of circumstances and conditions in which "bad" refers to either a moral "evil" or to an objective type of "harm". Although it is suggested by CDA that we also inquire into the social hierarchy and power relations implicit in the statement, namely the person or group making the claim versus the person or group who are "subject to it by implication" i.e. those who produce or use "drugs", CDA does not in itself identify "responsibility" as a defining characteristic or function of statements and claims.

Responsibility Assignment Narrative provides an analytical method focused specifically on the way claims about truth and reality shape perception and comprehension of moral responsibility and causality.

RAN proposes two ways in which responsibility may be constructed and deflected: the first is through implying and appointing "responsibility" (response-ability becoming, in the process, imbued with moral significance) and the second through the structuring of statements or claims to imply a causal chain of events.

The statement “drugs are bad” conceals within its syntax a hidden reference to a set of causes and/or “inherent properties”, i.e. that the relationship between specific “inanimate objects” (“drugs”) and certain “harms” is a causal chain of effects and events, in other words that these “harms” are an “inevitable outcome” of “drug use” because of “inherent properties” of “drugs” and the way these “cause” a “drug user” to behave. What the statement “drugs are bad” actually does is express a wide range of assumptions and generalizations that, through omission, imbue “drugs” or their “psychoactive effects” with power or a will of their own, in other words, "drug" is not merely causally "linked" to certain outcomes, it becomes synonymous with them.

So far, the arguments provided above are consistent with the ideas of Critical Discourse Analysis. RAN draws on CDA but focuses on a narrow range of concerns, namely the way statements or claims like “drugs are bad” interpret and "assign" moral responsibility or causality, to person(s), objects or circumstances.

Generalization and omission promote specific conclusions about the “meaning of a statement or claim” by forcing the receiver to infer a correct interpretation of moral responsibility or causality as the source of the claim.

The statement “drugs are bad” can therefore only be rejected as vastly inaccurate or meaningless, or as meaning that “drugs” themselves are capable of generating the outcomes interpreted as “bad”.

But the more significant question that RAN aims to expose is how moral responsibility or causality are constructed by the narrative or syntactic organization of a statement.

To all extents and purposes the person or group claiming that “drugs are bad” are actually stating that “drugs” are either “morally responsible” (in other words, that they somehow possess the power and/or purpose to influence human behavior in very specific ways) or that they are “causes” in and of themselves (because the outcome interpreted and/or experienced as bad is somehow an inherent property or quality of the “drug” or its “effect”).

Conclusion

RAN analysis thus proposes that the statement "drugs are bad" aims, wittingly or unwittingly, to assign moral agency to "drugs" and/or "drug users" as a means of either absolving certain others of moral responsibility or of diverting attention from a wider spectrum of contributing factors that together constitute a more complex set of circumstances producing an overall outcome experienced and/or interpreted as "bad" or "undesirable" (by certain other parties).

Although the examples offered here are taken from "drugs discourse" experience suggests that RAN's utility extends to practically all fields and disciplines and that questions about the way moral responsibility and causality are interpreted to meet the interests of certain parties may often reveal more about the choice of words and narrative constructs than other linguistic and semantic approaches precisely because RAN presumes that responsibility assignment and causal interpretations play a profound role in how human beings relate to each other and the world.

RAN therefore necessitates both intratextual and intertextual scrutiny as well as examination of social hierarchy and power relations and the way these respond to and are shaped by statements and claims invoking morality and/or causality.

RAN is substantially more than a 'method' of discourse analysis. In encouraging us to examine the 'entire narrative structure' rather than merely an isolated statement, RAN not only produces insights into the way concerns about responsibility and causality facilitate social and political inequality, power abuse and/or domination in discourse, it also presupposes and reveals how the interests of avoiding or appointing responsibility or blaming circumstances beyond control shape our understanding of reality. In other words, RAN exposes fundamental tenets of faith already present in the sociopolitical and cultural context and the way these facilitate certain types of misunderstanding, conflict, dominance and injustice.

Partial bibliography

Edited volumes

• (ed., with Casey William Hardison), Entheogens, Society & Law: Towards a Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility. Melrose Books, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1908645616 Search this book on ..
• (ed., with Casey William Hardison), Drug Policy: A Question of Responsibility, unpublished, 2010.

See also

• Critical Discourse Analysis
• E-Prime
• Alfred Korzybski

• E-Prime
• Alfred Korzybski

• Daniel Waterman
• Casey William Hardison

External links

• http://www.....

Sargent & Johnson, 1996: 123 Waterman & Hardison, Drug Policy: A Question of Responsibility?, 2010

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