With Great Power Comes Great Accountability. Or Does It?

There is a famous line from Spider-Man that almost everyone recognizes:

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

The idea is much older than Spider-Man, but perhaps its popularity comes from how naturally we accept it. Someone with greater power should exercise greater care. Their decisions affect more people, their mistakes can carry larger consequences, and their actions can change lives they may never personally encounter.

It seems almost self-evident.

But I have been wondering whether responsibility is the right word.

What about accountability?

An ordinary person makes a mistake, and its consequences might affect a handful of people. Someone with wealth, authority, or enormous influence makes a similar mistake, and the consequences could extend to thousands or even millions.

Shouldn't the second person be more accountable?

At first, the answer seems obvious. Greater power means greater potential impact, and greater impact should mean greater accountability.

But there is a problem with that reasoning.

We are assuming that accountability naturally follows power.

What if it doesn't?

What if the same power that allows someone to influence millions also gives them the means to avoid answering to anyone?

Perhaps the relationship between power and accountability is not as straightforward as we imagine.

Quote Investigator — The history of “with great power comes great responsibility”

Follow the Question: Moral Philosophy

Does the Same Mistake Become a Different Wrong?

Imagine two people spreading the same false information.

One shares it with ten friends. The other shares it with ten million followers.

Neither verifies the claim. Neither intends to cause harm.

Instinctively, we expect more from the second person. Their audience is larger, their influence is greater, and the consequences of being wrong could be much more serious.

But consider a different outcome.

Suppose the ten million people largely ignore the information. Meanwhile, one of the ten friends believes it, acts on it, and suffers devastating consequences.

Who should be held more accountable?

The person with greater influence created a much larger risk, but the person with the smaller audience caused the greater actual harm.

Suddenly, the answer becomes less obvious.

Are we judging people by their intentions, the risks they create, or the consequences that eventually occur?

These are three different things, yet we often treat them as though they are interchangeable.

If we judge only by consequences, then luck may determine how severely someone is blamed. Two people could make equally reckless decisions, but only one might happen to cause harm.

If we judge only by intention, we risk excusing carelessness simply because someone meant well.

And if we judge only by influence, we risk assuming that powerful people are automatically more blameworthy, even when circumstances are beyond their control.

Perhaps power changes something more specific than moral guilt.

It changes what a person can reasonably be expected to anticipate and prevent.

Someone communicating with ten million people may have a stronger obligation to verify potentially harmful information because the foreseeable risk is greater. Someone controlling an important institution may have a greater duty to investigate a warning because they possess the authority to act on it.

But greater power does not make every bad outcome their fault.

Nor does limited influence eliminate responsibility. A parent may have enormous power over one child. A caregiver may control decisions that determine the well-being of a single vulnerable person. Their influence is narrow, but their obligations can be profound.

Power, then, cannot be measured simply by the number of people who recognize your name.

It is also the degree of control you exercise over someone else's life.

And if that is true, accountability should depend less on status and more on what someone knew, what they controlled, and what they could reasonably have done differently.

That seems like a better principle.

But it raises another problem.

Even if we agree on how accountable someone should be, what ensures that they actually are?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Moral Luck

Follow the Question: Power and Visibility

The Strange Protection Power Can Provide

Responsibility is an obligation attached to our actions. Accountability requires that our actions can be questioned, examined, and judged.

The distinction matters because someone can possess great responsibility without ever having to explain how they exercised it.

Consider an influential public figure who makes a careless statement.

Millions may hear it. Thousands may criticize it. Their reputation may suffer, and the consequences can arrive almost immediately.

Now imagine an executive inside a large organization approving a policy that quietly disadvantages thousands of people.

The executive may never become publicly known. The decision might be hidden behind administrative procedures, technical explanations, or layers of management.

Who possesses more power? Who faces more scrutiny? And who has caused greater harm?

We cannot answer those questions simply by observing which person attracts more attention.

Yet public attention is often the closest thing we have to a visible measure of accountability.

Someone becomes famous for doing something wrong, and we say they have been held accountable. Someone makes an important decision behind closed doors, and we may not even know there is a question to ask.

This creates an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps we are better at reacting to visible wrongdoing than examining consequential uses of power.

The person everyone is watching becomes the subject of public judgment. The person whose decisions are difficult to see may face far less scrutiny, even when the effects are more serious.

But invisibility is not the only way power protects itself.

Sometimes wrongdoing is visible. Sometimes people have been asking questions for years.

And still, little changes.

Follow the Question: The Horizon Scandal

What If People Are Watching, but Nobody Is Listening?

The British Post Office Horizon scandal offers a disturbing example.

For years, sub-postmasters across the United Kingdom were accused of financial wrongdoing after a computerized accounting system reported discrepancies in their branch accounts.

Many insisted the figures were incorrect. Some were convicted of criminal offences, while others lost their livelihoods or suffered devastating financial and personal consequences.

The accounting system, known as Horizon, was treated as reliable even as questions emerged about whether software faults could produce apparent shortfalls.

The scandal was not discovered overnight.

Computer Weekly published an investigation in 2009. Sub-postmasters and campaigners continued challenging the Post Office. In 2019, the High Court established that bugs, errors, and defects in Horizon could cause accounting discrepancies. Convictions were subsequently overturned through the courts, including a landmark Court of Appeal judgment in 2021.

Then, in January 2024, the television drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office brought the scandal to a much wider audience.

Public attention intensified. Political pressure increased, and new legislation followed to overturn qualifying convictions.

The drama did not uncover the problem or single-handedly produce justice. Journalists, campaigners, lawyers, and affected individuals had already spent years bringing evidence to light.

But that history makes the underlying question even more troubling.

If people had been raising concerns for so long, why did achieving an adequate institutional response prove so difficult?

The answer cannot simply be that nobody was watching.

People were watching.

People were investigating.

People were speaking.

What they lacked, for much of the struggle, was the ability to compel the institution to respond adequately to what they were saying.

This exposes a dimension of power that is easy to overlook.

Power is not just the ability to make decisions that affect others. It can also be the ability to influence which explanations are accepted, whose evidence is trusted, and whose objections are dismissed.

When an institution's records are treated as authoritative, someone challenging them may be required to prove not only that the decision was wrong but that the apparently reliable system behind it could be wrong.

The institution possesses the records, procedures, lawyers, and organizational resources. The individual may possess little beyond their experience and their insistence that something has gone terribly wrong.

That difference in power can shape the entire dispute.

And suddenly, accountability appears less like an automatic consequence of wrongdoing and more like something that must be fought for.

But should justice depend on who has the resources to keep asking questions?

Computer Weekly — How the Horizon scandal was exposed, beginning in 2009

Courts and Tribunals Judiciary — Bates and others v Post Office, Horizon Issues judgment (2019)

UK Government — The Horizon scandal and statutory review of convictions (2024)

ITV — Mr Bates vs The Post Office and its audience (January 2024)

UK Government — Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act received Royal Assent (May 2024)

Follow the Question: Technology and Institutional Design

Who Gets to Demand an Answer?

Imagine receiving a notice that an automated system has rejected your application for an important service.

You believe the decision is wrong, but you cannot see how it was reached. You ask for an explanation and receive a standard response. You request a review, but the organization tells you its procedures were followed correctly.

From the organization's perspective, the matter may be closed.

From yours, the most important question remains unanswered.

Why?

The organization has made a decision that affects your life, yet you lack a meaningful way to examine it.

You have been given an outcome without a satisfactory account of how it was produced.

This is where the difference between responsibility and accountability becomes more than a philosophical distinction.

An organization might sincerely believe it has acted responsibly. Its employees may have followed every internal rule. Its managers may have approved every required procedure.

But if nobody outside the organization can meaningfully challenge those decisions, how would we know when the procedures themselves are wrong?

A system cannot be considered trustworthy simply because it consistently follows its own rules.

The rules might be flawed.

The information might be incomplete.

The people interpreting the evidence might share the same mistaken assumptions.

Meaningful accountability requires the possibility that an explanation can be questioned and, when the evidence warrants it, rejected.

That does not mean every complaint is justified or every decision must be reversed. People and institutions accused of wrongdoing deserve fair procedures too.

But an explanation that cannot be challenged is not quite the same as an explanation that has survived scrutiny.

And an institution that answers only to itself presents a peculiar problem.

It is both the decision-maker and, in practice, the judge of whether its decision was acceptable.

Perhaps the most important question about accountability is therefore not merely whether someone can be blamed.

It is whether the people affected by power possess a meaningful right to question how it is used.

Bovens (2007) — Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework

Follow the Question: Law and Ethics

Is Being Punished the Same as Being Accountable?

There is another complication.

We often recognize accountability through punishment.

A public figure loses a sponsorship. An executive resigns. An employee is dismissed. An organization pays a fine.

These events are visible, so they feel like evidence that justice has been done.

But consider what punishment does not necessarily tell us.

Did we establish what actually happened? Was the accused person treated fairly? Were the consequences proportionate? Did the harm get repaired? Did anything change to prevent the same problem from occurring again?

An organization could dismiss one employee while leaving the flawed system untouched.

A public figure could suffer severe reputational damage over an allegation that was never adequately examined.

A company could pay a substantial penalty and continue behaving in essentially the same way.

In each case, consequences exist. But consequences alone do not establish that accountability was meaningful or fair.

This matters because the original argument—greater power should mean greater accountability—can easily slide into a different claim: powerful people should receive harsher punishment.

Those are not the same idea.

Imagine two hiring managers using flawed software to screen applicants.

One oversees twenty applications. The other oversees twenty thousand.

Both receive warnings that the system may be unfairly rejecting qualified candidates.

It is reasonable to expect the manager responsible for twenty thousand applications to take the problem seriously. The scale of the possible harm is much greater.

But what if that manager immediately investigates and lacks authority to suspend the system, while the smaller employer deliberately ignores conclusive evidence of discrimination?

Who behaved more responsibly?

Status and scale cannot answer the question by themselves.

Accountability must consider authority, available information, choices, and actual conduct.

Otherwise, we risk replacing one unfair arrangement with another: judging people not by what they did, but by how much power we believe they possess.

That raises an important distinction.

Greater power may create greater duties without automatically establishing greater guilt.

A fair system should be able to recognize both truths.

It should not allow power to provide immunity, and it should not treat power as evidence of wrongdoing.

Beyond the Question

Perhaps Accountability Has Been the Wrong Question

We started by asking whether greater power should bring greater accountability.

At first, it seemed like a simple relationship between influence and consequences.

The more people you can affect, the more responsibility you should carry.

But our investigation has led somewhere different.

We have discovered that power does not always produce greater accountability. It may create the conditions for avoiding it.

Visibility can bring punishment without fairness. Invisibility can conceal harm without eliminating responsibility. Institutions can divide authority so widely that no single person appears to answer for the outcome. And people may spend years presenting evidence without possessing the influence needed to compel a response.

These are not merely problems of individual morality.

They are problems of how power is organized.

Perhaps we have placed too much emphasis on asking powerful people to feel responsible and too little emphasis on asking whether those affected by their decisions can demand explanations.

A person with great power may be thoughtful, careful, and morally serious. Another may be reckless or indifferent. But if accountability depends entirely on the character of the person exercising power, it disappears precisely when it may be needed most.

We cannot assume that someone will explain a harmful decision simply because they possess a duty to explain it.

Nor can we assume that public anger will reliably distinguish genuine wrongdoing from mistakes, misunderstandings, or false accusations.

The more difficult task is to make accountability possible without making it arbitrary.

To ensure that decisions can be questioned without assuming they are wrong. That evidence can be examined without requiring a public scandal. That people with little influence can challenge those with much more, without first becoming famous enough to be heard.

And this changes how I understand the original Spider-Man quote.

“With great power comes great responsibility” tells us what power ought to demand from the person who possesses it.

But it tells us little about what happens when that person refuses.

Perhaps responsibility is something power owes.

Accountability is what makes that obligation answerable to others.

And the true measure of accountability may not be how loudly society condemns powerful people when their actions become public, but whether ordinary people can demand an answer before their suffering becomes a spectacle.

Which leaves us with a question more uncomfortable than the one we began with:

If we demand accountability only when the consequences of power become visible, are we truly holding power accountable—or are we merely holding visibility accountable?