What is Accountability?

A lot of talk has been made in recent months surrounding the concept of accountability, fueled in large part by the role of big business and government in the current global economic crisis. The steady stream of heated debates taking place in mainstream media can have the effect of making accountability seem like little more than an issue of finger-pointing and placing blame on others.

However, while accountability does deal to some extent with assigning responsibility for choices and their consequences, this is only the most visible dimension of an age-old ethical concept that covers a broad range of topics, from the personal to the political and beyond.

Accountability in its major modern implications can be broken up into a few basic categories:

Accountability in Government

At its core, accountability is about the obligation to disclose one’s previous choices, justify them, and accept any deserved punishment for their eventual result – in essence, to answer for your actions. This idea plays a massive role in any political system based on representation. Legislators, for example, are commonly held accountable to the people who elected them, meaning that it falls to him or her to give an honest explanation when things do not go as promised or planned.

In the realm of public debate, more time is often spent assigning responsibility for political decisions than actually making them. In contrast, medieval monarchs were deemed to be "accountable to no one but God" for their actions.

Accountability and Business

Accountability in the business world setting has a lot do to with hierarchy – in other words, the chain of command, and who is responsible for what at each level of administration. Recent events have brought the importance of clear accountability in the private sector into sharp relief. The larger a corporation becomes, the more likely it is that poor professional and ethical decisions will slip through the cracks, often with devastating consequences.

Accountability in a Private Settings

While accountability in business and government has received a lot of press, it is also related to the more individual concept of legal liability. Personal injury cases, for example, are first and foremost about holding the defendant accountable for damages incurred by the other party.

A fall on someone else’s property could be a result of negligence on the part of the owner. If this negligence is provable, the owner may be considered to have failed in certain standards of accountability. Manufactures are similarly accountable for the integrity of their products, and employers can be held accountable to various degrees for the safety of their employees.

The Law Offices of Friedman and Bonebrake, P.C.
Includes helpful information on acountability in civil cases