This path breaking volume raises a number of necessary questions related to various aspects of responsibility for others through its multidisciplinary approach. Unlike its predecessors it takes a starting point in various empirical contexts and consequently draws conclusions from there on. The importance of the topic is reflected by absolute domination of neo-liberalism: facing a dismantling of the welfare state, privatization and the spread of `privatist` mentality in the era of individualization. The economic rationality sets the values that we are expected to live up to, reincarnating yet again the classical Frankfurt School diagnosis: politics are determined by economy. The importance of the method is reflected by taking real life situations as a starting point. In doing so, the method also challenges the current trend science generally where concepts are kidnapped from their native contexts, and recycled: re-used in contexts unnatural to them, where the only reality that matters is the one determined by the scientists’ ability to define it. This volume rejects the neo-liberal paradigm of ‘responsibility’ as the only valid interpretation of reality. Therefore academics, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as general readers will find this volume thought provoking. `…the commitment to situating questions of responsibility in social contexts – this is something that is neglected in philosophy and only recently coming to the fore in sociology.` Keith Tester, co-author of Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography 1953-1989, author of The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (2004), Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (2001). `This project is an original and valuable contribution to discussion of these important issues,... a good text for graduate and senior undergraduate texts in political theory, political philosophy, moral