RESPONSIBLE ACTION AND THE PROBLEM OF REIFICATION

This paper elaborates a “personal,” as opposed to an institutional, view of administrative responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility is better suited for appreciating the cognitive, conceptual, and interpersonal dynamics of policy processes than is the institutional view of responsibility as accountability. From the perspective of personal responsibility, the primary impediment to responsible action by policy makers, policy analysts, and administrators is not that they may act in ways that are ethically or morally wrong. Rather, the problem is that such actors may either not perceive that important choices are available to them or, when choices are perceived, their moral, as opposed to their instrumental, content may not be appreciated. Responsible action should thus be seen as a conceptual or cognitive issue, not simply one of adherence to or departure from institutionally objectivated standards of correctness. Inability to appreciate the moral nature of action may be explained by the cognitive tendency to reify policy making and administrative institutions, roles, rules, and situations.     

The church and sexuality in medieval Iceland

Although the Church's regulation of marriage and sex was felt by all Germanic tribes, this subject can be studied most closely in Iceland because of the richness of its source material. Four problems are examined here, from literary, legal, and historical sources, namely marriage, divorce, clerical celibacy and extramarital sex. All three categories of sources agree that marriage was a contractual arrangement between the families of the bride and the groom, as known elsewhere among Germanic tribes. They likewise concur that divorce was possible and easily obtainable. Clerical marriage, among both bishops and priests, was seen as acceptable in the legal and historical sources; the literary sagas do not deal with this issue. That extramarital sexual activities were common, is clear from the legal and historical sources but, in contrast, the literary materials depicts Icelandic couples as largely monogamous and faithful. This discrepancy between the historical and literary sagas, both products of the thirteenth century, can be explained by the growing influence of the Church, which by this time was attempting to introduce clerical celibacy and marital fidelity into Iceland. The thirteenth-century clerical authors of the literary sagas, set in ancient times, provided models intended to improve the sexual behavior of their audiences.