Strong and Weak Accountability
the concept of accountability and responsibility depends on freedom. In the previous sections, we have seen how limitations of freedom due to external constraint or brain pathology can naturally lead to the attribution of a lesser degree of accountability. However, if determinism is true, then there is no freedom at all and therefore no accountability.
In order to get round this unpalatable conclusion, alternative definitions of accountability have been put forward such as “weak accountability” which, some argue, is compatible with determinism. This will be discussed later. However, accountability in its strongest, and arguably truest, sense, “strong accountability”, “ultimate responsibility” or “initial choice” is not compatible with determinism.
Galen Strawson [i] describes “ultimate responsibility” as “something worthy of Heaven or Hell”. Alternatively he describes it like this: “Ultimate responsibility exists if and only if punishment and reward can be fair without having any pragmatic justification”. Compare the last paragraph of #5.2.4.
Derk Pereboom [99] gives a similar description of “Strong accountability” as something which “deserves blame or credit, not of the consequential kind”.
In other words we are “ultimately responsible” for an action if we can be praised or punished for the quality of the action itself rather than for the purpose of encouraging us to act differently in the future.
iGalen Strawson, “Freedom and Belief” 1986