Appreciating Responsible Persons

Given how central feeling, expressing, and receiving tokens of appreciation are in our everyday lives with others, one might wonder why these are important. Are these just instrumentally valuable because they make us happier, more satisfied with our lives, and more motivated to do good things in the future? Strawson suggested that “reactive attitudes” like resentment and gratitude are valuable because they are central to regarding others as responsible agents. This chapter takes this thought seriously and argues that if gratitude and appreciation are reactive attitudes, we will need to reconceive what it means to regard someone as a responsible agent. To be a responsible agent is not just to be someone who can be held accountable for failures, but also someone who has the capacity to take responsibility in a variety of ways. The chapter concludes with remarks about why expressing appreciation and feeling appreciated matter.

Febrile Polyarthritis: Should We Think About Disseminated Gonococcal Infection

Gonococcal disease is a sexually transmitted infection. The responsible agent is Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Disseminated gonococcal infection results from blood dissemination of N. gonorrhoeae from its mucosal first site of infection. In our cases, two patients had systematic lupus erythematous, in which one patient developed a dermetitis-arthritis syndrome and the other patient developed a febrile polyarthritis. The third patient was a healthy female who developed a dermetitis-arthritis syndrome. The treatment consisted of intravenous antibiotic and immobilization. The evolution was favorable in all of our cases.

Coping with the COVID-19 Pandemic: Roles and Responsibilities for Preparedness

The novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, was identified in China in December 2019. The responsible agent, SARS-COV2, was first isolated in China on January 9, 2020.

The Designer as a Social Agent and Promoter of Local Memories

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the role of the designer as a socially responsible agent and the impact that artefacts created by designers have. The goal is to understand if the designer can help preserve local memories, as well as assess whether co-working influences how they emerge in the project. The awareness of the designer as a social agent, who works in collaboration with various agents towards the creation of value-added artefacts, is essential nowadays. As a case study, we bring the project developed by the Designlab4u laboratory in the village of Alhos Vedros, were the cultural and artistic itinerary of the village was designated as a place of memory. Ultimately, the intention is to evaluate whether or not the work developed for the exhibition was a driver of local memories.

What We Have Time for: Historical Responsibility on the Largest Scale

A historically responsible agent is willing to be somehow in practical solidarity with all other actors with whom action is shared over time. The responsible idea of a most-inclusive history encompasses future occurrence together with all that has happened already. Despite our lack of control over future developments, we assess possible future ages as bright (if action opportunities are generally greater) or dark (if lesser) and position ourselves as contributors to multigenerational endeavors (such as Burke’s “all science” and “all art”) that we hope will be long-term successes in themselves and part of a larger historical optimality. Informed by the evolutionary sciences, a plausible modern envisioning of the future must include evolutionary innovations and surprises on a very long time scale. The historically responsible agent will therefore take seriously efforts like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men to imagine the new powers and goals of our distantly posthuman future sharers in history.

Ascriptions of Responsibility Given Commonplace Relations of Power

In most contemporary analyses of responsibility, attention has been directed exclusively to the specific conditions that must be met by the presumed responsible agent in order to be able to account for her actions. More attention needs to be paid, however, to the dynamics between the presumed responsible party and those who judge her responsible. Specifically, the standard approach pays little attention to the status of the party positioned to hold another responsible relative to that of the party from whom an account is expected. This oversight is problematic, because, depending on the practices associated with holding a person responsible, individuals may be sanctioned in ways that are quite harsh. This chapter expands an analysis of moral responsibility as a form of accountability to attend to these dynamics of power. While ascriptions of responsibility remain expectations that an account be forthcoming from the actor, this is too myopic a picture.