One day, you happen to randomly see two of your friends simultaneously punch the same stranger in the face and, later that night, you meet up with them to ask why. They explain the events that lead up to their punching the stranger and their individual justifications for why they decided punching the stranger was the thing to do in the moment. If asked to decide whether or not your friends are accountable for punching the stranger, how do you go about determining your answer?
First, it is helpful to distinguish between accountability and holding someone accountable. Accountability is an abstract measurement of an agent's culpability for an action whereas holding someone accountable is something a second party does in response to that agent's action. This response most often takes the form punishing or blaming the agent for the action in question.
Whether or not you hold someone accountable is a binary decision. Imagine you have to pick between one of the two following buttons in response to what each of your friends did to the stranger: Button 1 - Hold Accountable and Button 2 - Do Not Hold Accountable. How do you determine which button to press?
At this point, you could decide to hit Button 1 based solely on the fact that they each did indeed punch the stranger without accounting for any other factors. This measurement of accountability holds that agents are always and completely accountable for every action they take. Let's refer to this method of measuring accountability as the Libertarian Approach.
The problem with the Libertarian Approach that if there is even one additional factor that should be considered when measuring accountability, the entire approach quickly falls apart. To illustrate this, first consider how extreme additional factors like mental illnesses or disorders impact the measurement of accountability. For example, are people with untreated paranoid schizophrenia equally accountable as people without untreated paranoid schizophrenia for missing social engagements? Are people with Tourette's equally accountable as people without Tourette's for cursing at random strangers in public? To most, the different parties in the scenarios are obviously not equally accountable.
Why is this the case? What is it about these disorders that impacts the measurement of accountability? The answer lies in the relationship between conscious awareness and accountability. The difference in accountability in the first case stems from the fact that people with Tourette's have less conscious awareness over what they say and the difference in the second stems from the fact that people with untreated paranoid schizophrenia have less conscious awareness over what they think. This shows that degree to which an agent is accountable for an action depends of the level conscious awareness he has when performing that action.
To get to a more fundamental point: Does the severity of one's Tourette's have any bearing on his accountability for cursing at the stranger or does having a minor case bear equal impact on accountability as an extreme case?
Remember, the reason for the prior conclusion that having Tourette's influences accountability for cursing at all stemmed from its detraction of conscious awareness from an agent, specifically conscious awareness of what the agent says. This shows that the amountof conscious awareness Tourette's detracts matters when determining accountability. It is plain that those with more severe cases of Tourette's have less conscious awareness of what they say than those with less severe cases. Therefore, the more severe the case the greater amount of detracted conscious awareness. At this point, one concludes that the severity of one's Tourette's has bearing on the accountability one has for cursing at random strangers due to the fact that different levels of severity have different levels of impact upon conscious awareness and conscious awareness determines accountability. The four points below illustrate this conceptually.
1: An agent's accountability for an action is derived from the amount of conscious awareness he has when performing that action.
2: Additional factors reduce an agent's accountability for an action if they detract a sufficient amount of conscious awareness from the agent when he performs that action.
3: In order to determine whether or not an additional factor has detracted a sufficient amount of an agent's conscious awareness when performing an action to effectively reduce the agent's accountability for his action, one must first determine the amount of conscious awareness the additional factor detracted from the agent in the first place.
4: In order to determine the amount of conscious awareness the additional factor detracted from the agent, one must consider the severity of impact that factor has upon an agent's conscious awareness.
Using extreme cases like Tourette's and schizophrenia help deduce this methodology since severities of impact are easier to definitively quantify when based on medical diagnoses. Other less extreme additional factors like emotion, although not as easily quantifiable, reveal themselves as detractors of conscious awareness upon reflection. Have you ever done anything when you were emotional that you would not have done had you instead been in state of maximum conscious awareness? People often regret actions the they take out of hurt or anger once they "cool off" and recollect the conscious awareness they lost when in their emotional state. Often times, regrets over such actions begin to set in just seconds afterward they are taken. Even if you do not think emotion detracts the same degree of conscious awareness as something like Tourette's, one can conclude from personal experience that is still clearly detracts some amount.
Although not an exact science, one can use empathy to help determine the amount of someone's detracted conscious awareness due to emotion or other addional factors when performing an action. For instance, if you learn that the stranger insulted your friend's mother who had just passed away the day before, you can better comprehend the way in which your friend's actions were impacted by her emotional state. By relying on an understanding about how emotional states arise in others granted by your own personal experience, you can conclude that, had you recently been subjected to the painful experience of losing a parent and then encountered a offensive stranger condemning your recently deceased mother, the overwhelming pain and outrage you would feel would most definitely detract from your conscious awareness. It might even be fair to say that someone in that scenario is likely to act in a regrettable way that they would not otherwise had they been in their most rational headspace in that moment.
This methodology can be applied to even the most mundane of conflicts like a roommate turning the thermostat higher than a previously agreed upon temperature range. Does the roommate bear complete accountability for his minor act of treachery? Even in this very simple situation, it is easy to determine ways in which your roommate's conscious awareness would be limited. Maybe he had a friend over and they were cold and he felt the pressure to be a good host, maybe he was sick and had chills, maybe he heard on the news that a cold front was coming and and wanted to compensate for it being colder than usual. Even his being slightly cold would influence his conscious awareness in a way that it would not otherwise have been influences had he felt completely comfortable with the temperature.
So back to the buttons. In order to decide which button to press, you need to establish your subjective threshold of accountability to determine whether someone bears sufficient accountability to be held responsible. For instance, let's say you formulate a 10 point scale to determine total conscious awareness with 10 representing possession of maximum conscious awareness and 1 representing completely detracted conscious awareness and decide 5 is the threshold point at which you should hold someone accountable. To you, if someone scores a 5 or over, they had sufficient conscious awareness at the time of their performing an action to be appropriately held accountable for that action. For instance, you may think an incredibly severe case of Tourette's detracts from one's conscious awareness to the extent that the remaining amount of conscious awareness in their possession only constitutes a 3. Therefore, you would not hold that person accountable for cursing at a random stranger in public since their level of conscious awareness did not meet the threshold point of 5. Contrastingly, you may determine your roommate's feeling of being slightly cold only detracts a small amount of conscious awareness and leaves him with a score of 9 making him sufficiently accountable to be held accountable.
So which button do you press for your friends' punching a stranger? Do they bear sufficient accountability to be held accountable? That depends on your threshold and your evaluation of the severity of impact of the relevant additional factors in their lives on their conscious awareness during the time they punched the stranger. It is easy to adopt the Libertarian Approach, but, if you see how allowing for any other factors to influence accountability forces you to create a more nuanced form of measurement, it takes time, knowledge about someone's circumstances, and empathy to best determine how accountable one is for their actions and decide whether or not their level of accountability meets your personal accountability threshold.