Can anyone see a difference in the meaning of the following two phrases?
persons bearing the greatest responsibility
vs.
persons most responsible
FYI, the context is prosecutions for war crimes. Personally, they sound the same to me, but some people see a distinction between the two.
I don’t see a difference. What’s the distinction you’ve heard proposed?
Without the entire context it is hard to tell, but if I had to make an argument about the difference I would summarize it as follows:
Hypthetical:
Following orders, an Iraqi soldier fires a chemical weapon at American troops.
The Iraqi who actually launched the weapon would be the one “most responsible” for the act. The launch occured as a direct response to his actions. The commander who gave the order (as far up the chain as it goes) “bears the greatest responsibility” for the launch. It was his decision to use the weapon, and he set the direct chain of events into motion.
As a matter of pure semantics, I would judge the phrases to have identical meaning. If I wanted to ensure precidion and avoid possible confusions of connotation, though, I would use the first phrase.
My reasoning is that the word “most” can carry a connotation of “majority”, and thus might be read ambiguously when the persons bearing the greatest responsibility did not, in fact, bear a majority of the responsibility.
If I were very, very, picky in my diction I might also reject the use of “most” (as in many-more-most) as being strictly correct for a degree of enumeration but not for a degree of intensity.
To me, “persons bearing the greatest responsibility” sounds like the people who should have been in charge, the authority; “persons most responsible” sounds more like the people who actually did the action.
Without knowing more about the context, I’m inclined to take an intermediate standpoint between previous responses.
Greatest responsibility: the highest up the organizational ladder (i.e. the minister/general/president). The one who can influence the most actions.
Most responsible: the one legally or morally primary liable for the act. That can be the one who actually did it, or the one higher up.
Example 1: with Enron the CFO was responsible for finance in both senses. The secretary who on his order destroyed a document was not responsible.
Example 2: a German soldier in WW II is ‘hunting’ Jews after receiving the order to. The greatest responsibility was on Hitler, but the soldier is primarily responsible for his acts as well.
Example 3: an employee working for a money transportation firm, plans and executes a robbery. The management has some responsibility insofar as they hired the guy and possibly took insufficient security measures, but the primary responsibility is undoubtedly on the employee.
I didn’t want to prejudice the responses by suggesting a difference, but Kofi Annan seems to think something along the lines of what’s been suggested so far, though I can’t make much sense of his explanation. The problem is that there is no context that indicates what these phrases mean. This is from the Statute for the Special for Sierra Leone, and it doesn’t attempt to define that phrase. It seems like if he wanted to make it clear that people who were not in a position of command authority may be prosecuted, they should just say that! I guess I read things too literally, because I couldn’t see any difference at all.
For the curious, here’s exactly what the Secretary-General wrote:
Only international lawyers could come up with this crap.
I go with amarinth. To me , “bearing the greatest responsibility” reads as “those with the weightiest decisions to make over the matter” (i.e. where the buck stops). Whereas “most responsible” just reads as “who most directly caused it”.