Personal Responsibility: The Forsaken Value Posted on 12/26/2010
It’s not my fault, but somebody thinks it is.
It’s everybody else’s fault, especially the
corporations and city managers who have deep pockets.
It’s nobody’s fault, but we have to blame somebody
for failing to prevent it.
It’s never my fault, but sometimes it is, a little.
It’s complicated, defining who’s responsible and to
what degree.
When things don’t go our way, we often first look
outward for someone or some system or some policy or some institution to blame.
Laying fault on others makes our own lives easier, whether or not others are
to blame, even partially, for the consequences of our own actions. If it isn’t
our cold, hard, introspective habit to examine our own part in the fine mess we
find ourselves in, we can generally find someone to pin our failure on, no
matter how tangential their involvement, no matter how unrelated their actions,
no matter their intent or desire to see us fail or see themselves succeed.
Owning up to our own bad behavior is hard. Admitting
any blame means fixing what you broke. Making something right can cut into your
day and hit your bank account. You’ll endure some humiliation and embarrassment,
and live with nasty looks from people who condemn you for your choices. You
might lose the trust and respect of those in your circle of associates. If
something didn’t go as you’d planned, maybe you’re not as competent as you’d
like to think, and now everybody knows it. That’s a painful admission, even to
clear-eyed realists. Admitting that you made a mistake could also mean risking
unemployment, divorce, abandonment by friends and relatives, lost love, and even
jail time.
How Do We Determine our Personal Responsibility?
Posted on 12/26/2010
Our direct action is the most clear cut example of
when we are responsible for an effect. We sand a plank of pine, and the plank is
ready to take stain. We nail that plank into place on a sundeck as shown in our
how-to book, and that plank is ready to take the weight of friends we have over
for a barbecue dinner. That plank splinters and breaks under a guest’s
weight–well, then it’s time to consult an attorney to determine liability in the
breakage of our guest’s ankle; is nature that produced the pine tree at fault,
the millers of the plank at fault, the sellers of the plank at fault, the
publishers of the how-to book at fault, or you and your guest at fault for not
noticing weakness in the plank and then not taking reasonable precautions?
Mostly, lawmakers and law enforcers will tell you your degree of personal liability in any given context if you’re ever brought up to answer charges. But the law hardly matters in our daily lives, invoked only when we’ve been wronged or possibly committed a wrong so that our grievances can be settled using objectively defined boundaries hammered out over the centuries by scholars and practitioners in the legal community. Routinely, we each decide how much responsibility we want to take on, as a subjective matter. Others, in their harsh judgment, have other criteria for measuring the boundaries of your duty, but someone else’s judgment doesn’t create the truth of your actual responsibility. If you’re ambitious, you take more responsibility–and the credit for successes you create.
Does what we know and when we know it determine our level of responsibility? Read more
Socializing Personal Responsibility
Posted on 12/26/2010
We are asked to increasingly serve ourselves. We pump
our own gas. We bank our money at machines. We bag our own groceries. We haul
our own groceries to our cars. Taking on these personal responsibilities saves
us money we’d otherwise be charged for convenience services.
But sometimes we’re not expert at self-serve tasks.
The ATM eats our debit card, we forget our PINs, we dribble gas on our cars when
pulling out the pump nozzle, we can’t get the grocery store coupons to read in
the self-serve checkout lane, we misplace decimal points in our tax returns. We
complain that the self-serve infrastructure isn’t user friendly enough, and
somebody should take responsibility for our errors because of the needless
complications and numerous potential for making mistakes.
As an example of how pervasiveness socialized mentality has become, one
day while unloading my shopping cart into my car in the parking lot of a grocery
store, a jug of liquid laundry detergent fell from the cart’s bottom rack. I had
personally loaded the cart inside the store and wheeled the cart to my car. The
lid of the detergent bottle broke in the fall, and about a cup of liquid
detergent flowed onto the blacktop before I could retrieve the container and
upright it. A passing customer, seeing the incident, suggested I return the
bottle to the store and get my money back. This made no sense to me, since the
series of events and my own carelessness caused the fall and subsequent chance
breakage.
Personal Responsibility and the Law
Posted on 12/26/2010
Laws are intended to keep civil order by applying
fair standards impartially and equally to everyone, without exemption, while
also being general enough so that the population who must comply can know how
they are expected to act in a variety of circumstances toward other individuals
but not so specific that people are commanded to act in prescribed ways on a
daily basis. Laws should be preventive in nature and act as a deterrent to
criminal behavior.
Many laws don’t meet this standard. Some penalize
success. Some laws force everyone to conform to the needs and abilities of the
least able and least competent few, thereby restricting the freedoms of the most
able and most competent to indulge and take pride in their skills. Some laws
compound victimization, excusing criminals on the loose because the victim
didn’t exercise due caution against being attacked.
Many laws create new crime by defining existing, outer limit behavior as
criminal; high speeds on freeways prove dangerous to poor drivers who share the
road, so low speed limits are set in an attempt to keep a few bad drivers from
getting into driving situations that they can’t handle. Blanket restrictions
against a common behavior are made in the hopes that one type of accident or
crime can be prevented, though the fair approach would be to make individuals
pay for their mistakes when they make them rather than restrict everyone from an
activity in an attempt to eliminate future mistakes that will always only be
made by a very few. Blanket restrictions that forbade students from bringing
over-the-counter pain killers into public schools resulted from an overreaction
to an idiot kid who showed his elementary school classmates the Percocet pills
he’d sneaked from his mom’s purse. Rather than train teachers to recognize legal
from illicit pills, schools developed what is termed zero tolerance for any
legal substance in pill or tablet form. Numerous lawsuits filed against public
schools for potential safety violations must be remedied quickly with new
policies and new restrictions on every student’s behavior because city
governments cannot afford to lose lawsuits and make monetary payouts.