What does it mean to be responsible in a circumstance of necessity? On the one hand, necessity seems to release people from responsibility: whether necessity justifies or excuses, it renders people immune from criminal liability. On the other hand, necessity seems to burden people with a greater responsibility: the responsibility to violate the law when extreme circumstances warrant it. Thus my central question: what does it mean to be responsible in a circumstance of necessity? This question cannot be answered without attention to the situatedness of different political actors. In this essay, I examine how that responsibility is figured differently...

In a ghoulish misreplication of the clichéd diagnosis in which a patient is told he has only a short time to live before cancer kills him, a young man at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose was recently told that he had only three days to live after hospital staff mistakenly administered cancer treatment into his epidural shunt in the place of another drug. Accidents involving toxic chemotherapy drugs have happened before, for example, a highly publicized lethal overdose was given to a youngBoston Globejournalist a few years ago.¹ Chemotherapy drugs have evolved from nitrogen mustard gas, originally used...

This chapter looks back at the early 1990s, when the U.S. home front of the “new world order” was absorbed in major political confrontations over civil rights and welfare.¹ By 1990, major civil rights legislation was before Congress, with welfare reform soon to follow. Debate was starkly partisan, and novel forms of insecurity associated with globalization added new tensions to the proceedings. Although civil rights and welfare involved debates of long standing, I look to the legislation of the 1990s as benchmarks in the history of social security in the United States. My focus is on the politicization of responsibility...

Whereas. In looking for a conceptual and linguistic source of “responsibility,” one could do worse than the word “whereas.” This is especially so when “whereas” is used as the introduction to a policy or proclamation. TheOxford English Dictionarytells us that the word began with its contrastive connotation, as an “illative or adversative conjunction,” and subsequently emerged as a signal of due attention paid to prior contingencies—“in view or consideration of the fact that.” It then underwent a rather sudden and swift identification with contractual legalese in the 1790s, becoming the first word of many contracts. It even...

Under the headline “Melancholy Occurrence,” newspapers in the Hudson River Valley and beyond regretfully reported the death of Hiram Comfort, a wealthy and respectable merchant of Catskill who “put a period to his existence” on June 25, 1839, by jumping from the steamboatErieand perishing in the river. Comfort was accompanied on board by several friends, who ardently hoped the journey would cure the merchant of the “mental derangement” he appeared to suffer as a result of unspecified “business difficulties.” But less than a mile into the trip, Comfort eluded the grasp of his companions and sprang overboard, disappearing...

In 1941, during the London Blitz, Winston Churchill instituted the Act to Provide War Damage Insurance, which aimed to distribute as widely as possible the loss of property due to the bombings. As Churchill explained in a public address, the measure was taken in the interest of those whose homes had been destroyed, “to reassure them that they have not lost all, because all will share their material loss.”³ Churchill’s response to the attacks on London shifted the emphasis from “what” to “who,” from thing to person. From the question of what had been lost—“they have not lostall”—...