Individuals in democratic societies vary in their social points of view, their values, their morality scales, and in the significance of these factors in establishing spheres of personal and social priorities. Membership in a society means sharing with other members worldviews that embody common moral fundamentals and commitments. The society partially provides the meanings, methods and rules for implementing those values.
Democracy should be based on deliberation, personal commitment, social accountability and basic democratic values, which should all function within society as a social and moral compass. In societies, at large, and democracies, in particular, we assume that members are responsible not only for their individual actions, but also for the collective behavior of their community. Individual commitment to democratic values and collective responsibility cannot be reduced to accepting the majority decisions, voting and obedience. Membership in a democratic society requires taking responsibility at the personal and collective levels.
There are four dimensions of responsibility - causal, moral, remedial and communitarian. Those dimensions jointly entail the direct responsibility for personal and societal actions of each member even when he or she does not share the causal responsibility for a particular deed. Because responsibility is vague and politically biased in the public sphere, it is customary to demand that disobedient individuals be held accountable for their activities and be required to answer for their lack of responsibility and misconduct. It is similarly common to ignore the responsibility of the obedient.
When an individual witnesses evil, he or she has a responsibility to stop it, and to support the victims. Every individual should act to reduce the inconsistency between deeds and values or moral intuition, and moral responsibility should move the democratic citizen to take a stand when the activities, laws and orders are incompatible with democratic values. The diffusion of responsibility, obedience based on conformity, search for external authority, internal exile and ongoing retroactive responsibility assist individuals to evade responsibility and accountability.