Q&A: Responsibility vs. Guilt
Responsibility vs. Guilt
Question
I listened to your lecture in the “Talmudic Thinking” series, where you argued that in a case of two people driving while drunk, one killed a person and the other did not—both are equally wicked, but the one who killed will go to prison because of the responsibility he bears.
If the difference between them is responsibility, I would expect to see that the one who killed would pay compensation to the family (and the other obviously would not). Prison is punishment, and it seems like punishment for criminal wrongdoing. And furthermore—someone who drove sober but made a mistake and killed someone will get a very light punishment יחסית, even though he killed just like the drunk driver did and bears responsibility.
In addition, it’s not clear what responsibility without guilt means. If Ohana is not guilty for the Carmel disaster, what does it mean to say that he is responsible for it? Should he have done something differently? Maybe he appointed unsuitable people? Apparently not, because then he would be guilty. And if he made no mistake, then what does his responsibility require of him? Very often, when people take responsibility, they resign—but if in fact he did nothing wrong, why should he resign? I think responsibility really does mean guilt, just indirectly. If you are responsible for the system, you need to appoint suitable people, make sure everyone is doing their job, carry out surprise inspections, etc. The claim is that if something happened, there is a 99% chance that you had some connection to it.
Answer
I don’t think I ever said such a thing. Responsibility is not going to prison. I distinguished between guilt and responsibility, but I did not say that people are punished for responsibility. Responsibility means that the duty to repair what happened rests on you (such as paying the family). Not that you are punished for it. Someone who drove drunk and nothing happened is a case of guilt without responsibility, not responsibility without guilt.
Responsibility without guilt is like in Ohana’s case. He has indirect responsibility because what happened occurred while he was serving as minister. Maybe indirectly there is something he could have done differently, but it does not rise to the level of guilt that would justify punishment (because a reasonably normal person would have acted that way. As you wrote, “some connection”). And sometimes there is responsibility with no guilt at all, and that is in order to strengthen the sense of responsibility among officeholders in the future; then responsibility is imposed on them for the sake of future education even without guilt.
By the way, my friend Menachem Finkelstein, who headed the committee on the prisoners’ escape from Megiddo Prison, told me after the report was submitted that in the State of Israel they have never imposed ministerial responsibility without guilt. Even though conceptually it is certainly possible, as I explained here.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed, and I also wrote and said that. I’m just not sure that this is a weakness. Such revenge can be a legitimate legal objective.
I understood you to be trying to explain why it is appropriate for the drunk driver who killed someone to go to prison, while the one who did not kill should not. You explained it by saying that the drunk driver bears responsibility. I think both should receive exactly the same punishment, unlike what happens today.
Then you understood incorrectly.
So it seems we agree, but maybe a small disagreement remains—I claim that there is no difference at all between a drunk driver who killed someone and one who did not. Both are equally wicked and should receive the same punishment. The reason I think this is not what happens in practice is human weakness. Whether we admit it or not, one of the significant elements in punishment is revenge against the offender. In fact, this is completely out in the open—you can see in sentencing decisions that judges write this explicitly when they make the punishment more severe.