Responsibility and Justice

Abstract

The research demonstrated the limitedness of Kant’s and Rawls’ approaches to the understanding of correlation of responsibility and justice. For Rawls, as well as for Kant, responsibility first of all relates to individual’s freedom (and with existence of just political institutions). In other words, the American philosopher concentrates on the problem of justice of institutes and individual actions. But the questions of human responsibility for environment, responsibility for realization of the principles of justice, at last, the problem of collective responsibility stay outside this approach. It is demonstrated that responsibility is determined not only and not so much by individual’s autonomy. Responsibility is connected with a feeling of guilt for the actions of community (to which the individual identifies himself), with a necessity of realization of the principles of justice through transformation of institutes and practices. At last, responsibility can be anthropologically determined in the case when we speak about the preservation of life on the earth. Interpretations of the sphere of responsibility and sphere of justice as coinciding ones were also refuted in the work. It was established, that the bounds of the former are wider at least because they include practices which are not regulated by the principles of justice.