Bénédict Winiger, Responsibility, Restoration And Fault

Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0561
Published date01 May 2019
Date01 May 2019
Pages286-288

This is the English translation of Winiger's German book, Verantwortung, Reversibilität und Verschulden (published in 2013 by Mohr Siebeck). The book centres on the question of responsibility and is divided into two parts. First, the author gives a broad overview of certain ancient legal and philosophical texts pertaining to liability and responsibility and in the second part, he sets out his criteria to measure responsibility.

At the outset, a distinction is drawn between responsibility and liability, which helps to better understand the nature and purpose of this research project: while liability is based on a legal system, with laws generally accessible to most people, there are, of course, no official rules for responsibility and neither is there any official organ that decides on whether a course of conduct was responsible. Whereas individuals can privately decide for themselves whether conduct may be described as being responsible, a finding of liability involves a judge-made decision that is binding on the parties to the conflict. It is against this backdrop that the author examines “the question of which criteria allow each and every individual member of society to say whether she or he finds a course of conduct responsible” (4).

The first part of the book contains three individual chapters that are dedicated to texts from Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. In...

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