The paper articulates a new understanding of individual responsibility focused on the exercise of agency in reason-giving rather than intentional actions or attitudes towards others. Looking at how agents make sense of their actions also allows us to identify a distinctive space for assessing individual responsibility within the context of collective actions, which so far has remained underexplored. We concentrate as a case in point on reason-giving that occurs when individuals engage in necessarily less-than-successful rationalisations of their involvement in a shared practice, like systemic corruption.