John Miller's Suffering Analysis

Miller addresses the issue of individuals’ need to be responsible for the suffering of others whose basic rights have not been protected. According to Miller, people should step in during such situations and provide resources that would abate the suffering. This form of accountability has been defined as remedial responsibility. Further, Miller goes ahead to explain the concepts of remedial responsibility that can be applied in the situations that require an individual’s intervention when another one is in need. There are four principles explained here, and they include moral responsibility, causal responsibility, community, and capacity.
First, the labeling of an individual as causally responsible for the suffering of another person after identifying the role played by the agent in a casual manner may be biased. In this paper, the suffering party would be referred to as the patient P while the one assumed to be responsible would be referred to as the agent A. Although a particular agent may be singled out as the one with the greatest level of responsibility for P’s suffering, there might be another party that made A causally responsible. However, since P’s state of affairs could still be as a result of A’s deliberate actions, then A would be casually responsible in this case. On the other hand, the concept of moral responsibility can be seen to be the most controversial among the four principles posited by Miller. …show more content…
According to Miller, the moral blame would be placed on the agent due to the role they played in the suffering of others. The identification of the agent responsible for P’s suffering could sometimes be a difficult process, yet Miller implies that it is always possible to single out the agent. Taking the example given in the article, when a person starves due to a terminal disease or the failure of his crops, agents whose actions could have prevented this can be identified. For this case, it may be said that the provision of medicine or the installation of an irrigation system could have abated the situation. However, Miller goes on to single out the responsibility of the identified agents to P’s state of affairs. Even if there is a special link between the two parties, the situation has to be thoroughly assessed to identify whose fault it was for the misfortune. Often, the suffering party could be put to blame due to the failure of honoring certain terms in the agreement between the two. Also, the division of causal responsibility between various agents who have been identified to cause P’s condition may be a difficult process. Again, if the identified agents are more than one, the distribution of responsibility to each may be a biased process. …show more content…
The forward-looking theories have been described as the assessment of P’s condition to find out who is responsible then relieving the victims through a remedy by the agent. On the other hand, backward-looking theories blame the agents for any suffering that may occur to P.
In the event that the principle of causal or community responsibility is invoked when the morally responsible agent is incapable of remedying the situation, then this will be unfair. Miller also implies that the change of principles applied to remedy the suffering of an individual may be done when the morally responsible agent cannot be identified. However, for both cases, assigning community or causal responsibility amounts to blaming the wrong parties on the misfortunes of