Abstract

No consistent and universal definition of responsibility has been provided so far – neither in the general scientific context, nor in studies and research explicitly related to the responsibility phenomenon. In this paper I outline a minimalistic definition of responsibility exploring to what extent the >preresponsible concepts< duty and guilt merge in our contemporary understanding of responsibility. Epistemologically the minimalistic definition of responsibility combines three ideas: to be responsible is a normative concept, it means to be answerable for something, and is based on the assumption of a certain psycho-motivational constitution of the responsible agent.