Without assuming that I know very much about
It, thought I would take a look at the the idea of responsibility. I am not saying that I don’t know what
responsibility is, or that I myself feel no responsibilities, or that I have none. I am simply trying to assume as little as
possible as a principle in inquiry. I will
survey some of this vast territory and lay out any landmarks I can see.
Taking a look at the idea of
responsibility is a way of getting at moral ideas – more broadly, investigating
responsibility can be a way of looking at human being. Creating an idea
and looking into it as a model for understanding ourselves – like creating a
machine and then analyzing the way it works – these seem like basic human
practices. We try to see ourselves via
proxies – to see in the language of symbols and models – to unpack by
indirections some of the dilemma of being a person.
Some phenomena in language
The English ‘responsibility,’ with a
Latin root, shows up in French as responsabilité, Spanish responsabilidad, Portuguese responsabilidade, Italian responsabilità. The German term Verantwortung, literally,
answerability, like the Danish answar, Estonian vastutus, Dutch verantwoordelijkheid
– these terms are very close to the English liable, accountable,
answerable.
It
is important to see the idea through the filter of culture – so as not to
overinterpret any one tradition -- also to open up to the variety of ways in
which people get at this idea. The long
Norman influence in Britain brings a legal vocaulary into English conceptions
of morality -- right, duty, felony, leniency, tort, misdemenor, penalty, injury, liability, fault.
The idea of legal
responsibility is formulated as the obligation to answer for an act -- and to
repair any injury caused by it. But then
the state of being answerable gets gradually examined -- the idea of diminished
capacity, or diminished responsibility, gets formulated. The doctrine of mens rea, guilty mind,
the mental state accompanying a forbidden act, unknown to the Greeks, becomes
standard in European traditions. This
has the odd consequence of redefining a criminal offense as being accompanied
by a requisite mental state. Then
the mental state itself gets picked apart.
It has to be intentional, knowing, reckless, negligent -- in 1960 the ‘Dusky’
standard emerges, defining competency to stand trial, and thus be held legally
responsible, as implying a rational understanding of one’s acts, and the
appreciation of basic facts, and the ability to assist in one's defense. Thus an insanity defense, or a defense based
on being intoxicated or being in error, might mitigate the existence of a
specific mens rea -- an insane person is said to be not mentally
responsible or minimally someone whose responsibility is diminished,
lessened, not fully assignable.
In Japanese there is the character tan
(担),
responsibility, literally burden, to bear, to shoulder, to carry –
in this case, not related to the law.
There is the character michi (道), responsibility,
literally road, path, country lane, street; it can also mean
God. The character giri (理), responsibility,
literally counting, seemingly from ancient concepts of debt,
being in debt, and thus being held
accountable, being accountable.
The idea of the moral burden is embedded in Bushido culture but dates
from much earlier -- from ancient Japan -- probably from China and ultimately
from Buddhism. The root sense is that of
being bound. If you do not feel it, you are not
bound. If you do feel it, you sense that
your actions have consequences. You act now to discharge your obligations -- in
fact, this is what you are. You
are exactly what you show yourself to be in upholding your duty.
Among
the Kwakiutl, everyone is entered into the ceremonial potlatch ritual beginning
as a small child. You take on the
responsibility to make an opulent ceremonial feast at which possessions are given away or
treated as nothing to display wealth or mark one's prestige. In a context like this, you are what you
give.
There are cultures in which the
language of responsibility centers around money, sex, power. Responsibility can be an exchange; it can be
reciprocity -- there is the Confucian ethic of social co-creation at an
opposite pole of American individualism. If I can speak from my own background,
as the child of Jewish parents who grew up in America during the Depression,
the struggle to achieve economic success, and to demand high achievement from
their children, informs what 'responsibility' means for me. So did my parents' deep commitment to
democracy -- believing that "to whom much is given, much is
expected," trying to instill a responsibility to "give back," to
take part, to get involved in the world, to try to make the world a better
place. A Jew is not supposed merely to
be a human but to be a mensch, a good man, an upstanding person
In all these cases – the sense of being
responsible, bearing your burden, playing your part, being held accountable,
fulfilling your duty, giving back -- this can be everything one is.
At this juncture the evidence suggests that
culture portrays the bind that defines human being in various different
vocabularies. Let's just assume that
there is no absolute way -- no right words -- no perfect or universal
vocabulary to approximate this powerful concept. There's a long list of stand-ins -- many
entries – metaphor after metaphor.
Though it seems obvious that some
cultures appear to create a kind of obstacle course to trip a person up -- the
sort of place imagined by Franz Kafka -- whereas other cultures create positive
models for social cooperation (e.g., the Danish idea of hygge, conviviality,
comradeship, comfort being together, which is explicitly taught in primary
grades to inspire unselfishness) -- the very idea of setting up a hierarchy
of moral systems is offensive – this is not an approach that earns much respect
today. We should treat historical moral traditions
exactly as we do languages, cultures, table manners, fashions in dress -- i.e.,
not by arranging them into a hierarchy -- but simply evidence of human
diversity.
The American anthropologist Donald
Brown documents the construction of the self as a responsible agent, the
redress of wrongs, sanctions for offenses against the society, as basic human
universals -- "features of culture, society, language, behavior, and
psyche for which there are no known exceptions" (Human Universals,
1991).
Thus we have the universal binding tie,
but at the same time the endless variety of cultural practice. There is no easy way to cut this down to
size. But it is there in every corner of
human space. It takes on different
shapes.
A note on the law
Tracking the use of the term
‘responsibility’ in the law is helpful.
The word seems to be used in two ways.
Responsibility is the obligation to
answer for an act and to repair any injury caused by it. It is the state of being answerable.
At the same time, the term is used in
expressions like responsible officials, responsible bidders, responsible
agents. The sense here is that
characteristic the absence of which would cause fair-minded and honorable
people to doubt whether the matter in question is being managed in the best
interest of the public.
Responsibility as obligation shows its
close connection to standards of guilt rather than shame. Guilt attaches to a particular
transgression; the offender expiates guilt through restitution, accepting
punishment, apology, or some such gesture to reset the balance of
justice. This is the ‘price’ – the Germanic stem guilt traces back to geld,
gold – suggesting an economic subjection underlying later moral notions. Shame is the more narrowly moral idea – the
primal shame accompanying body exposure is the archetype – the thing we are
most ashamed of. But shame may attach onto
virtually anything. I can be ashamed of
my face, my body, my family, my background, my poverty, my race or religion or
gender – my country or my political party.
Feeling shame seems to demand that the offender reform – not just redress; if I have done something shameful, there
is no restitution to pay. Experience
suggests that if I can make a person feel ashamed, then I have him under my
control; in this sense, shaming is a strategic move in a struggle for
power.
In talk about responsible people,
this can mean two things – the ones to blame, the people who are guilty and
should be ashamed; or people who act responsibly, who uphold minimum standards,
people we can respect, people we can trust.
Some observations about the idea
Regarding the psychology of
responsibility: the assumption of responsibility marks the beginning of adult
life, exiting the world of the child still bound in the world of the
parents. Yet the concept seems
antiquated -- it sounds moralistic. It
is basic to human psychology but still seems awkward.
Odysseus promises to come home and he
comes home. He fulfills his
responsibility. This was something he
laid down. He means to do a thing and he
does it. It is an act of will. Thus it is a human creation, an invention, a
fiction. This gets at the awkward character
in responsibility. The Greek scholar
David Roochnik studies “responsible fictions” and concludes that, weak as they
are, we can’t do without them. We have
to do the best with what we’ve got (Responsible Fictions, 2007)
In the world conceived by natural
science, every effect has a cause. The
idea of responsibility seems awkward in part because it appears to defy the law
of causation to magically transfer the agent to a frictionless world of free
action. Binswanger captures the problem
in his saying that our fates are determined by the forces of life, whereas we
determine the forces of life as our fate (Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a
Friendship, 1977).
Today the word ‘responsibility’
resonates with blindness to the circumstances of a person's life and the
conditions that make it possible for someone to act autonomously – it’s a move
in a power game – an attempt to direct public rage.
There is also a symbolic voltage in merely
saying the word ‘responsibility’ in our epoch of history because so many
people, in so many places around the world, behave so very irresponsibly in
public, notably including the starkly bad behavior and the most degrading
influence on public life in many decades -- the 45th President of the United
States.
Notable on the current scene is the
frequent attempt to evade responsibility. Political leaders try to escape
responsibility, corporations try to escape responsibility – the church,
Facebook, the W.H.O., legislators, candidates – entire countries -- everyone
seems to want to deflect blame or to blame someone else. It is rare to hear anyone say ‘I was wrong’ –
‘I am the person to blame’ – ‘I take responsibility.’ The term ‘responsibility’ today has a very heavy
connotation of being a burden or an unnecessary hassle or just a lot of useless
baggage.
There is less a sense today than in
generations past that taking on a duty is an honorable thing to do. Responsibility (in the sense of taking on an
adult role) seems less important. Taking
on a moral burden (and showing that you are capable of it) seems less
urgent. Much of the veneer of supposedly
‘honorable’ duties has been stripped away.
The concept has a weaker resonance in the wake of social changes.
Psychology generally seems less a force
today in the way people try to explain the inequities in society. There is more a focus on economics. There is an insistent strain of determinism –
people are less confident about being ‘free’ enough to ever be ‘responsible’ or
act ‘responsibly.’
Another angle on responsibility comes
from the idea of ‘earning it’ – the idea that no one is going to give you
anything, and that you can’t count on people giving a damn, so that you have to
dig deep and make something happen because you care about it. It’s up to you. The energy comes from you.
Another strain of meaning comes from
the reaction to the prefab society into which everybody gets thrown – we didn’t
choose any of this, but we have to deal with it.
Another angle is, ‘I didn’t have anything
to do with this, but I’m being held responsible for it!’ – another is, ‘I’m not
responsible for this mess, but I am going to try to do something about
it.’
Wittgenstein gives us the term
‘language game’ – what we are looking at is the language-game of
responsibility. Let us open up this game
and examine its mechanics. Looking into
these mechanics, we see an awkwardness, what looks like an impossible
combination, a fiction, a power move, a blame game, a burden, a hassle, baggage,
something one takes on -- the rules that you have to deal with, the way you see
yourself, your reaction to the modern scene, your grit -- maybe your decision to drop this whole thing
-- seeing yourself as caused, doomed, fated, finished -- language shows us all
of this.
Some phenomena in folklore
The Eden story conceives the human
condition in terms of responsibility – Eve’s sin – Homer explains the cause of
the Trojan War in terms of responsibility – the Judgment of Paris, choosing
beauty over power or wisdom – generally we see a magical background to help
empower the social bond .
The language of lowliness, indebtedness
and submission speaks to a hierarchical society and fear-mongering as an
instrument of social control.
John the Baptist appears in the
wildness and proclaims, “Repent! For the Kingdom of God is near” (Matthew
3:1). The presence of holiness,
goodness, value, worth, virtue suggests bowing one’s head, shame at one’s
lowliness. In his classic study, The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), William James concludes that at the root of religious
feeling, is a sense that "there is something wrong about us as we
naturally stand." The human condition gets described and redescribed by
reference to moral failure – the human being is a sinner – someone who is
capable of sin. "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" (Job 5:7).
'Sin' is one example -- but globally there
are many ideas about social failure -- the Japanese ideogram Tsumi (罪), indicating divine punishment for having broken the law -- like the Greek pthonos (Φθόνος), Mandarin zui, with the same ideogram -- presumably the ancestor of the Japanese term -- (罪), meaning crime, blame,
fault, offense -- or the Moari Hara, being in violation of tapu, crime,
wickedness. In Native American cultures, the 'trickster' figure might absolve one of responsibility -- in the Phillipines, there is concept of running amok -- another condition in which the person no longer has any responsibility.
Some theorizing about responsibility
Aristotle claims that we can only be
praised or blamed for actions that we initiate ourselves, whether they are good
or bad. Thus we choose these actions,
and they are in our power. It is in this
sense that we can say that someone was at fault. We do not criticize a person as a result of
their having a disease – instead we pity them. Whatever we are not responsible
for, we cannot be blamed for. He notes
that we should not fear disease or anything else that is not the result of vice
– whatever is not the result of our own action; what is not in any way our
fault – the only thing to fear is vice. –
This is from Nicomachean Ethics, Book III
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book
VII, Aristotle makes the statement the people who fall into brutish conduct –
low, disgraceful, animalistic – should not be blamed for it.
“Now where Nature is the cause, no
one would charge the subjects with blame ...”
For the same reason, we do not call animals perverse or temperate, or
inanimate objects.
According to Hume, a person is
responsible only for actions to proceed from his "characters and
disposition." Thus to attribute responsibility is to to assert that the
behavior issued from an enduring feature of character -- not some quirk or whim. I can really only be credited, and therefore
I can only be blamed, for action that is truly mine, and emerges from my real
character (Treatise of Human Nature, 1740). The contemporary American philosopher Harry
Frankfurt rethinks this idea into the "identification" approach
to moral responsibility. The idea is
that I can only be responsible for something that is fully mine -- not everything I do is fully mine -- this is a
way of recognizing that we have attitudes towards our own motives, and
sometimes we are proud of what we do, sometimes ashamed (The Importance of
What We Care About, 1988).
John Doris's more recent study Lack of
Character (2002) quarrels with relating moral failure to character, also
looking closer at the relationship between the celebration of moral character and
the circumstances of this kind of attribution.
Doris points to Nietzsche (168) as showing
us very plainly all the baggage borne by notions of character.
Nietzsche associates the idea of
responsibility with waking up about oneself -- not telling oneself a pleasing
fairytale about life -- instead finding the focus to muster within one the
necessary intellectual honesty to face oneself – to turn the critical
focus inward without flinching – taking off the blinders – calling out the lies
we have been told – calling out the lies we have been telling ourselves. This means becoming suspicious especially
about the idea of responsibility itself.
Nietzsche argues that the idea of
responsibility arises initially in the circumstance of powerful people trying
to control less powerful people and keep them in line. It is a ruse to keep the powerless in a
one-down position. If I can scare people
into thinking of themselves as responsible for what they do, guilty about what
they do, ashamed of what they do, then I have succeeded in getting them under
my control. Thus, at the outset,
responsibility is a complete fiction that is imposed upon hapless victims by
people who behave very irresponsibly.
Nietzsche would laugh at current arrangements in American jurisprudence,
where we often see people of means acquitted of crimes and held ‘not guilty’
for their actions, whereas people with few or no resources at all are held
‘guilty as charged’ and bear full responsibility for their crimes instead of
being let off. He saw exactly this kind
of hypocrisy in his own society and in the sad record of the past.
Consider some recent successful
strategies used by attorneys for wealthy clients, including the abuse excuse,
the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness,
media violence, rock lyrics, rap lyrics -- the shrunken amygdala defense,
hypometabolism, frontal lobe irregularities, defective genes for monoamine
oxidase A, violent video games, the XX male syndrome. Disparities in the outcomes of judicial
proceedings between rich and poor weaken the very idea of ‘responsibility.’ The idea of ‘legal responsibility’ verges
toward patent fraud – what then?
Nietzsche reasons that if we look at
“the long story of how responsibility originated” we begin to see the
“disciplining of the human animal into an agent who can act to fulfill a
responsibility” -- “breeding an animal that has the power to make promises and
to keep them” -- “something that has now penetrated into his lowest depths and
become instinct -- perhaps even a dominant instinct” (Genealogy of
Morals, II). There is a kind of
“dreadful forgery” at work here (Gay
Science, 7) -- “a tremendous rat’s tail of errors” (Will to Power
705). Owing to these lies and errors, we
have (in effect) created the most important fiction in our lives – the fiction
of personal identity – from which we get an idea like self-responsible
action (Dawn 148). “This whole species of intentions and actions
is purely imaginary” (Will to Power 786). Even though it is imaginary, even though it
is a nonentity, we live in it – we exist in this empty space. “What is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself” (Twilight of the Idols 9, 38).
Thus, at the root, the whole conception of responsibility shows itself
to be a kind of fantasy world, an imaginary causation, a fictional main
character whose story is unfolding: so that we create structures for ourselves
to fit into, and then reimagine ourselves inside these stories.
The existentialists help us see that
‘responsibility’ has a long history -- Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault lead
us back to the Greeks -- “The Greeks, more than any other ancient people, and
in fact more than most people on the planet today, had a remarkable sense of
personal agency -- the sense that
they were in charge of their own lives and were free to act as they chose. The very definition of happiness for the
Greeks was that it consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit
of excellence in a life free from constraints.”[i] At least one version of the lie begins
with them.
Much of Greek scholarship since the
Enlightenment sees a huge transition gradually taking place in Greek culture,
beginning with a warrior ethic, devoted to competitive virtues, and later
flourishing as an experiment in citizen democracy, in which cooperative virtues
replace contests for power as the chief values upheld in society. Adkins’ classic study Merit and
Responsibility (1960) shows that at the beginning of Greek culture, men
were praised or blamed simply for their success of failure, whether one earned
it or not. Praise and blame had nothing to do with negligence, ineptitude or
events beyond one’s control. A man’s intentions,
therefore, were irrelevant to appraising merit.
New ideas begin to dislodge the warrior ethic – this is what Jaspers
tries to describe in his concept of the ‘Axial Age,’ and what Karen Armstrong
described decades later as ‘The Great Transformation’ – a change from praising
success in battle to celebrating an idea like that of justice. Adkins shows that in the problem of
appraising moral ideas, intentions are crucial. Success does not excuse bad intentions;
failure does not tarnish the brightness of a good will. Thus, with the transition
to the cooperative virtues – which Adkins also describes as the transition from
shame to guilt – morality migrates to the “inner life.” Merit was formerly
something that everyone could easily see – victory or defeat, taking the prize
or losing. Responsibility has to do with
taking the burden on -- which is unobservable -- to see it would almost
require the impossible – i.e., looking into another person’s mind.
Aristotle tries very explicitly to make
out the distinctions between voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary actions
in Book Three of the Nicomachaen Ethics.
Actions are involuntary if they are performed under compulsion, or
when the agent contributes nothing to them; acts done through ignorance are
non-voluntary; but acts due to temper or desire are
voluntary. When we act morally,
practicing the cooperative virtues, we do so by choice, i.e., we do so by our
own powers – grounded, again, in the idea of the pursuit of excellence in a
life free from constraints. When
Aristotle proposes these problems to himself, he conjures up an agent, an
actor, someone who deliberates, someone who makes choices and acts, and he
thinks that the way to get at this is to look at the basic
dispositions that a person has, i.e., what he calls a person’s “character.”
Aristotle seems to be arguing that
having a good character protects a person from shifting fortune in life.
Greek has many words that help to express an idea like this, but so does
English: steady, dependable, steadfast, unwavering, unflinching, strong-willed,
strength of character, strength of mind, strength of will, emotionally
strong. Greek and English also both have lots of words to express the
opposite kind of idea: weak, fickle, disloyal, faithless, irresolute,
indecisive, capricious, erratic, flighty, weak-willed. These
vocabularies map out the principle that the person of good character will do
well and the person of bad character will fare badly in life. Thus, the
morally responsible person is someone possessed of a “firm and unchangeable
character” (1105a27). This begins the tradition continued by Human and Nietzsche ...
At the outset of discussions about
‘responsibility,’ notions like that of freedom, intentions, choice, actions,
dispositions and personal character lie in the background. One has to assume from the beginning that there
is something like an agent and that the ‘agent’ is free. An ‘agent’ is the self-constructed homunculus
that Nietzsche is especially interested in.
‘Free’ means: not a slave; not compelled by anyone else in what one
does. The concept of responsibility gets
formed in Greek history against the background of the institution of
slavery. This suggests that the
remarkable sense of personal agency that the Greeks seem to have had – the
powerful sense that they were free – may have emerged from their making
other people into slaves.
A slave may not see himself as the
master of his fate, but a wealthy landowner might. An ethic of character
may be a mirror of a society in which some people hold power (people of wealth,
from 'noble' families, who are 'well bred') and some people are merely pawns
(the poor, the uneducated, people of 'ignoble' birth). Doris puts this idea as follows: “the
discourse of character tends to play out against a background of social
stratification and elitism.”[ii]
This might explain why Aristotle
associates the virtues of magnificence and magnanimity with wealth, power,
reputation, and good birth (1123a6, 1124b2, 1124b17). This may be why Hume ties virtue to the
“delicacy of well-bred people” (Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and
Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1777) and why even Nietzsche uses the
term “noble” to signal the “highest type of man” (e.g., in Beyond Good and
Evil, 1886; Genealogy of Morals, 1887). Ultimately, we have to face the question whether
Athenian civilization, and its many achievements, did not in fact depend on
reducing a great number of people into the condition of slavery. Thus, one part of the ‘lie’ at the origin of
the idea of responsibility is the founding lie of society, the lie of ‘noble’
and ‘ignoble,’ ‘high-born’ and ‘base’ – as Doris puts it, an ethic of character
tends to degenerate into a caste system.
The point here is that there is a kind of elevation inscribed in the
master-slave relation, such that the master feels imbued with a sense of power,
and that the underlying social hierarchy, which depends upon reducing an entire
class of people into a dehumanized state, lies at the origin of the concept of
personal responsibility. The distinction
between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ is fundamental throughout the structures of thought
and morality for the ancient Greeks.
The nameless slave Epictetus
internalized this structure but discovered his way out of it:
“I must die. I must be imprisoned. I must suffer exile. But must I die groaning? Must I whine as well? Can anyone hinder me from going into exile
with a smile? The master threatens to chain me: what say you? Well, chain me … you will chain my leg … but
not my will. Not even Zeus can conquer
that.”
The language-game of responsibility
gets a bit more complicated here – it’s still the language of power, language
that claims and exemplifies strength, purpose, will, character – defying even
divine overseers – thus an indominable will.
Yet it is the language of a slave against his master. It is the language of the slave against the
power of the free – political defiance and self-determination get connected,
whereas previously self-determination was connected to the landowner and the state.
We see many attempts by ancient writers
to justify the institution of slavery – for example, in Aristotle’s theory of
“natural slavery” – and in later centuries such great lights of moral progress
as Ibn Khaldun, Bartolome de las Casas, John Locke, Voltaire, Benjamin
Franklin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Thomas Jefferson, all
develop their various complex theories of morality and responsibility, while at
the same time looking down on some or other people, holding them in slavery,
and expressing the most ignorant and foulest ethnic and race prejudices that
one can imagine.[iii]
The upshot to this point in the
argument is that responsibility is a lie -- or rather two lies – the lie which
turns a human being into a ‘character,’ quickly shuffled off into one of two
categories – strong or weak; – and the lie of turning human society into a
hierarchy, granting some people a high-born, elite status, and a moral
character to match it, and another group of people a low status, looked upon as
barely human, with a suspect moral character.
Nietzsche makes a great advance in
seeing that the idea of responsibility arises in the circumstance of powerful
people trying to control less powerful people, to load them up with shame and
guilt, in order to keep them in line. In
effect, Nietzsche is arguing that power relations are inevitably relations of
domination. Power descends necessarily
in a linear direction from those who have it to those who are subjected to
it. The history of morals can therefore
be summarized as the class struggle, pretty much as Marx portrays it. Power is inherently asymmetrical: certain
subjects possess and exercise it, precisely in repressing certain other
subjects. ‘Responsibility’ equates to a ruse to
get someone under your control – someone to blame and punish.
Foucault begins his investigations at
this point in the argument and uncovers at least one more layer in the long
history of responsibility. The starting
point is again power: power is not just the government – central power –
reigning over people via force or the threat of force, as Machiavelli
suggests. Power is everywhere – everyone
wields it – in effect absolutely every human being wields power. The resort to a show of force looks more
like a lack of power than real power itself.
Whatever we do, whatever our circumstances, whatever our bent of our
mind, we are making choices – which is, exercising power. Foucault looks at every form of compliance
and resistance. He looks at the whole
network of relations in society, including the power in just getting defined as
a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’ – parenting, educational systems, examinations, basic
training in the military, surveillance – the whole way in which people get
defined in medicine, psychiatry, criminology – in the hospital, the asylum, the
prison, the factory, the school. He
documents the enormous power in being categorized and labeled and set upon by
‘experts.’ He sees that the older dichotomy between domination and resistance
makes less sense – think of the corporate executive or political leader who is
also a henpecked husband – the same individual can be both powerful and
powerless in different systems. Some
forms of resistance work to reinforce authority, some hollow it out. Some forms of power seem palpable and
physical, but others are more definitional or emotional. There is no universal binary division – no
basic us vs. them. The
battlefield is now everywhere. Society
is a war of all against all. Everyone is
fighting everyone else. Everyone is
after something and everyone is putting up resistance. Also – there doesn’t seem to be any main axis
in society. Depending on where one is,
and what role one has – carpenter, mother, husband, sister, teacher,
Republican, computer scientist, horse trader, electrician, minister – the
coalitions and conflicts keep shifting.
It isn’t free vs. slave, noble vs. plebian, lord vs. peasant, owner vs.
worker – it’s responsibility vs. responsibility – friend and relative and
neighbor and partner and countless other relationships that people create in
society. Foucault argues from these
premises that we are free – we are never trapped by power – we exercise
it, we resist it, we can always find ways to change its hold over us – we can
always do something, say something, make something felt and known – there is
never only one way, there is always a way out.
Foucault continues and deepens
Nietzsche’s careful autopsy of the responsible person and -- in so doing --
restores much of the concept’s symbolic charge.
In effect he exposes the lie of thinking of oneself as powerless. So there are three lies to
contend with at the foundations of the concept of responsibility: the lie of
turning a human being into a character – the lie that turns human society into
a hierarchy – and the lie of turning oneself into a thing.
The psychology of responsibility
Responsibility is a crucial focus
for therapy – in some cases, e.g., in Otto Rank’s ‘will therapy,’ the sole
focus (Truth and Reality, 1929).
William James notes that increasing the sense of responsibility is
pragmatically effective: accepting responsibility helps the individual to act
responsibly (The Will to Believe, 1897).
The capacity for taking on
responsibility is something that separates adult life from childhood – it is
problematic if children take this on too soon or if adults wait too loo long –
which puts the psychology of responsibility at the center of human
personhood. Erikson, Piaget, Kohlberg
and many other developmental thinkers try to map out the normal stages by which
people emerge from a pre-moral condition into a stage of moral and personal
responsibility.
Some of the pieces of the
‘responsibility’ puzzle are emotions like shame and guilt. Freud connects the root of morality to primal
shame at bodily exposure, and experiences like embarrassment, public exposure,
and humiliation, in his classic Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930). Nakedness is archetypical and
connects human beings both to one another and our animal ancestry. But then shame may attach to new objects – to
my appearance, my poverty, my family, my hypocrisy. Freud thinks that guilt typically attaches to
a particular transgression and requires redress; transgressors expiate guilt
through restitution. Shame is much
broader and ultimately requires revision of the self – you have to become a new
person. Disgust is important – if someone
disgusts us, then in effect we have committed a kind of ‘moral murder’ – we are
denying this person membership in the world of respect-worthy people. Then there are social experiences – among
which might be something like ‘moral education’ – in which we build cognitive
skill, and learn such things as ‘ideas’ and ‘principles.’ Aristotle thinks he can discuss all of these
things together in talking about things like habits, dispositions, and
character. The idea is roughly that if a
society’s practices of moral education work, then people will experience
negative self-directed emotions, and negative self-directed thoughts, when
their behavior is destructive – this will help them get back to
themselves. Freud calls this Uber-Ich
-- 'Over-Me.'
Nietzsche is suspicious about
responsibility because he thinks this entire subject is a kind of phantasm and
imaginary causation. The causal efficacy
of emotion, the causal efficacy of thought – this is a kind of conjuring out of
pure air. The American psychologist
Michael Gazzaniga takes the same position – the term he uses is ‘epiphenomenal’
– that is, these ‘mental’ experiences, our ‘consciousness,’ and all the
cultural material centered around character and self and identity
– this is all a kind of side show and unnecessary performance – a
"confabulation" or memory error in which we substitute a pleasing
fantasy that helps “fill in the gaps” rather than confront the jagged edges of
broken instants.
Gazzaniga introduces the idea of the
“interpreter module” which (according to his researches) is the cause of people
having the very powerful illusion of
having a self, and with it whole collection of ideas surrounding this concept,
including the sense of agency, and the sentiment that we freely make decisions
in our actions, and the entirety of our sense of responsibility. This “interpreter module” provides a kind of
storyline or narrative for episodic experience, as well as for the larger
course of our lives; and thus we all believe we are ‘agents’ acting of our own
free will, and that we are making choices that change the outcomes of our life
stories. This interpretation is so powerful (he argues) that there is no amount
of analysis that will change our conviction that we are acting willfully and
with purpose. Gazzaniga says that this illusion is comparable to the belief
that the earth is flat.[iv]
In effect we need a kind of background
grid to make sense of the complexity of experience. Euclidean geometry is an idealization of
physical space that makes the game of science work. The science game plays with material objects
according to the rules of natural science.
The world is close enough to this idealization to make science useful. Free will is an idealization of the human
space that makes the game of ethics work.
The ethics game plays with agents according to the rules of morality – much
of this lies in ‘responsibility.’
Writers like Critias, Thrasymachus,
Machiavelli and Clausewitz make the cynical case against responsibility -- they
appear to weaken the sense of responsibility -- though perhaps they only warn
us about the nature of man. Human beings
for Machiavelli are “ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of
danger and anxious for profit; love is a bond of obligation which these
miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them
fast by a dread of punishment that never passes” (The Prince, §62) -- certainly a low estimate of Homo
sapiens' capacity for responsibility.
But these writers speak for the dominant will, the will that spares
itself nothing. Christianity draws
enormous power against the backdrop of antiquity in the "spectacle of an
inspired self-sacrifice," as Matthew Arnold called it, and the example of
someone who refused himself everything (Culture and Anarchy,
1869). Thus we make the magical case for
responsibility. Shakespeare seems to ponder these wavering estimates --
"This supernatural soliciting, cannot be ill, cannot be good" (Macbeth,
!, 130).
Thinking empirically, we get a
realistic perspective on the question about responsibility from Stanley
Milgram’s famous experiments at Yale University in the 1960s. Ordinary people were recruited by a newspaper
ad offering a cash payment for people willing to participate in a “study of
memory.” They were brought to an office where a man in white coat explained
that the study was designed to determine the effects of punishment on
learning. Volunteers had to administer
an electric shock to a subject. The real
purpose of the study was to determine how high a level of shock the volunteers
would administer. At 150 volts (labelled
’slight shock’) the subject demanded to be released from the experiment – at
285 (‘danger’) he would start screaming – he would fall unconscious before
reaching the maximum 450 (‘severe danger’) (in fact the man was an actor who
was a confederate of Milgram’s).
Two-thirds of the volunteers went to 450.
Milgram concluded that when people
complied with what was apparently an inhumane order, it was because their sense
of responsibility had been diminished.
He noticed that when they took on the stance that they were “only
following orders,” that they tended to denigrate the victims. Thus it is easy to see, e.g. that when a
white police officer uses excessive force to subdue a black suspect, he quickly
justifies it by calling the suspect a name. Trying to reassure ourselves about
the propriety of following a rule that inflicts harm on someone, we denigrate
them – Milgram thought that this reaction uncovered a deep human need to see
the world as just – i.e., if we did not believe that justice was important, we
would not bother to denigrate the victim.
The ultimate result of the experiment was the finding that the sense of
responsibility is disturbingly weak.
In reflecting on the experimental setup
and the results of the study, Milgram tried to explain to himself that the
sense of responsibility is weak because it arises from the social
instincts. The social instincts make us
want to go along, be liked, follow orders, win approval, be one of the
gang. Thus the moral sense is at the
mercy of the changing social ethos.
Chimpanzees don’t cooperate with strangers. The social tie has to be coached out of its
initial, defensive position – ‘responsible’ but only within a narrow orbit – in
order to make the jump to broader social cooperation. In a way, this problem is a kind of hardwired
guarantee of freedom. The capacity for being a decent person, and for being a
monster is, at the root, exactly the same thing.[v]
The ethics game is an idealization, but
perhaps the world is close enough to this idealization to make the game useful
– as E.M. Forster said, “For the purpose of living one must assume that the
personality is solid, that the ‘self’ is a real entity, and ignore all the
contrary evidence.” The science game is
played according to the rules of empirical observation – but this may not make
sense for the ethics game. Nietzsche may
be right that there is a kind of fraud at work here, but perhaps the judgment
about this fraud is misplaced and, in a way, driven by an anlogy with science
that does not apply. The standard in
ethics may not be whether a narrative is accurate but whether it is compelling. This gets us back to William James’ point
about responsibility: it works. It is pragmatically effective: accepting
responsibility improves one’s ability to act responsibly.
Consider the distinction between a
world of physical objects and a world of independent moral actors. The object is determined in all of its nature
and motions. Psychoanalysis regards
agents as compelled, but also as capable of making rational decisions;
humanistic psychology begins from the premise that human behavior is the result
of free choice; and existentialism generally holds the extreme position that
even in the most dire of circumstances, people ultimately have choices. So in effect the perspective adopted in
medicine, for example, where we are looking for organic explanations of
behavior, and the perspective adopted in the law, which holds individuals
responsible for their conduct, are completely incompatible. Therefore medical personnel should not be
permitted or cajoled into giving opinions on legal issues; and lawyers should
not have anything to say about medicine.
And yet this is not how we play the ethics game. Typically both medicine and law fudge the
line between knowledge and opinion.
Therefore the way the concept of responsibility is treated in society
and its evident doublespeak in medicine and law and thus its overall flightiness
and incoherence – its self-contradiction – empower the critical response of
determining for oneself exactly what weight – if any – to give to the concept
of responsibility – which is in effect to do what the concept merely
says.
The UC Berkeley philosopher R.J.
Wallace’s book Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, from 1994,
argues that responsibility implies “powers of reflective self-control.” Powers of reflection seem to be different
than powers of self-control. In the law,
a deficiency in either has been exculpating.
The so-called M’Naughten standard, dating from 1843, exonerates a
defendant who cannot tell “right from wrong.” The 1972 U.S. Brawner
decision elaborates this precedent, exonerating a defendant who by “mental
disease or defect” lacks substantial capacity “either to appreciate the
wrongfulness (criminality) of his conduct, or to conform his conduct” to the
rule of law, connecting reflection and self-control. Wallace thinks
despite all the vagueness that a normal person can tell right from wrong (and
feels the moral motive) and has power enough over his or her own actions to
"behave responsibly."
The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker
offers a sober analysis of moral responsibility in his 2002 work The Blank
Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature -- picking the concept
apart but, at the same time, trying to support it, by showing us what it really
is.
“Why
is the notion of free will so closely tied to the notion of
responsibility? And why is biology
thought to threaten both? … Biology
becomes the perfect alibi, the get-out-of-jail-free card, the ultimate doctor’s
excuse note … Here is the logic: We blame people for an evil act or a bad
decision only when they intended the consequences and could have chosen
otherwise.”
Pinker
is showing here that – buried in normal condemnation – there are underlying
ideas like intention and free will. Self-control and normal thought processes are
just as important:
“We
show mercy to the victim of torture who betrays a comrade, to a delirious
patient who lashes out at a nurse, or to a madman who strikes someone he
believes to be a ferocious animal, because we feel that they are not in control
of their faculties. We don’t put a small
child on trial if he causes a death, nor do we try an animal or an inanimate
object, because we believe them to be constitutionally incapable of making an
informed choice … This is why we object to such practices among our ancestors:
the Hebrew rule of stoning an ox to death if it killed a man; the Athenian
practice of putting an ax on trial if it killed someone (and hurling it over
the city wall if it was found guilty); or the medieval French case in which a
cow was sentenced to be mangled for having mauled a child; or the whipping and
burying of a church bell in 1685 for having assisted French heretics." Today,
with clearer thinking, we see these cases as the outcome of completely natural
causes, rather than locating intention or will or satanic forces in an ox or an
ax or a church bell.
“The
logic of condemnation seems to be: if someone tries to explain an act as the
effect of some cause, then the explainer is saying that the act was not freely
chosen, and that the actor cannot be held accountable. But at the end of the chain, we have to be
able to see that ‘to understand is not
to forgive.’ … [assembling the argument then] we should believe that unless a
person was literally coerced (that is, someone actually held a gun to
his head), we should consider his actions to have been freely chosen,
even if they were caused by events inside his skull …”
“The
point is that we have to think clearly about what we want the notion of
‘responsibility’ to achieve. Whatever
may be its inherent abstract worth, the idea of responsibility has an eminently
practical function: deterring harmful behavior. Thus, unless a person is willing to suffer
some punishment, claims of responsibility are hollow” (excerpted from pp.
175-180).
Pinker
concludes from these considerations that we should keep scientific explanations
separate from our sensibilities on moral questions. Science should not corrode our sense of
responsibility -- we need it, we should uphold it -- we should think about ways
to recreate it.
Responsibility is a useful human
creation -- a key to human identity -- but it has nothing to do with explaining
what is going on in the world.
‘Explaining things’ is in one category – ‘willing’ in another. Thus
we have Aristotle, Epictetus, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Milgram,
Foucault, Gazzaniga, Wallace and Pinker all pretty much telling us the same
thing, which is that the world of human beings is not the world of physical
objects. We are obliged to regard the
notion of responsibility in a special light. Consider
also the idea of living in the world without the ethics game. The nakedness of the world without
the dressing of human purposes quickly renders cosmos into chaos.
Sartre says that a real person sees
himself as responsible for everything except
for the fact that he is responsible -- “I carry the weight of the world by
myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it” -- “I am
responsible even for my desire of fleeing responsibility” -- “in fact I never
really encounter anything except my
responsibility” (Being and Nothingness 555-6).
Basic constructs implicit in this idea
There are three basic constructs at the
root of ‘responsibility’ – a human being fashioned into a character – human
society made into a hierarchy – and human being contrasted with the
‘thing.’ It is because we have some
character that we can be held responsible for something; we are strong in
contrast to something weak; and no one is forcing me to do what I do – I am
free. These are subroutines in the
responsibility algorithm. The responsibility algorithm is a recursive function:
to accept my freedom makes me free.
Let us examine a little closer each of
these conundrums – character, hierarchy, thing – and finally the recursive
function itself -- to assess where the argument leads, and whether looking into
philosophy gets us any closer to understanding responsibility.
Self as character
Our reflections have led us to a
fictional, cultural, created self. The
idea of responsibility is a useful creation.
The sense of responsibility, the ethics game, is a convenient invention.
The implication is, again, not the universal, but the particular, the
parochial. That is: selfhood is
contingent at the root. Indian and Chinese and Native American people are not
just different from one another, they are or have entirely different kinds of
selves. The basic psychological
structure and basic sources of inspiration for being a self as such are
entirely different – they are composed of entirely different materials. These may not even be the same sort of beings
– how do we classify entirely fictional beings?
Note the inherent problem that any classificatory scheme we came up with
could be criticized as being too monolithic – not covering enough diversity,
enough differences, variants, special cases.
What is it like to be a self? Bruner and Erikson talk about selfhood in its
granular construction up from earliest bits of competence (ego nuclei), through
many developmental crises and stages, to big assemblages of experience,
connectivity and idea-formation (durable incorporations). Marx, Gadamer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, the
Frankfurt school, Humboldt, Weber, Robert Bellah, Aristotle – philosophy
looking at society and concepts of selfhood that show human beings emerging as
distinct selves via social networks.
Jaspers, de Beauvoir, Buber, Schutz – philosophy discovers that one
cannot become a self on one’s own. I am a self only in virtue of some people
who I talk to. I have speaking partners
who are essential to my achieving self-definition. A self exists within
webs of talk.
Think of storytellers who narrate the
struggle to become a self – artists who portray the dizzying inner world – a
dizzy descent into rich detail – the interior monologue and life struggle in
its different colors – all this material is parochial, contingent, singular.
Broken bits of lives, materials that preceded us, which are reincarnated in us
-- the start-and-stop self-assembly process.
Character is not innate, but made --
this is success made of failure -- the kind of thing that Kant was describing
when he said that "From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing
is made." Trying to make something
of yourself, facing yourself -- to do this is 'moral struggle' -- this is
'self-confrontation' -- this is 'self-conquest.'
Self as hierarchy
Plato begins chipping away at the ideal
of sovereign ‘agency’ in the Republic, Book III, in the ‘myth of the
metals’ – the ‘noble lie’ (γενναῖον ψεῦδος) – showing that class and conditioning
have an inalterable effect on a person’s character – stressing both the huge
impact of early childhood experiences and the import for a person’s life
chances that he is born into an elite, as one of the Guardians, or into a lower
station, destined only for menial labor.
Thus the focus of his studies changes from psychological questions to
practical politics: if the problem of self-regulation is ultimately about how
things are arranged in society, then human beings can only improve themselves
by creating a better society. The
problem of agency is not merely how to control myself but to how to flourish as
a social being and help bring about the good society in my community. The problem
of personal agency is ultimately the problem of creating a just society in
which education equips a person for taking on and flourishing in an active role
in society.
Plato reasons that in effect the state
creates the self and that statecraft is a kind of self-maker. The ‘city and man’ argument in the Republic
gives us an idea about the high and low places in society but also a way of
thinking about the self and its construction of itself in its high and low
places.
Thus Plato gives us the problem of the
hierarchy but not yet any self-consciousness about his own construction as a
slave-owner in a slave society.
We can think of a self or a society as
a hierarchy in the sense that what a person does and what the record of
history shows about a society demonstrate values, goals, things set above and
below one another, in the game of ethics.
If we try to put the vast collection of
cultural forms themselves – selves and their characteristics, societies and
their values – into some kind of hierarchy, this immediately breaks apart, as
applying parochial standards universally.
But then they are all on a level; the noble lie fails; there is no
hierarchy. There are no high or low
places.
The difficulty is that we need to
create value distinctions in order to pursue the good, yet this means condemnation,
and setting in a low place, and discounting, and disrespecting -- in order for
the self to have any character at all or stand for any principle
at all (instead of being a spineless chameleon) -- in order for there to be the
assertion of the positive, there must be the withdrawal backwards of the thing
negated.
Building character is
'conquering' oneself -- self-mastery, not being a slave to oneself, not being a
slave to one's impulses. Self-reproach,
self-destructive impulses, self-denial, self-harm -- weigh these terms in the
scale with self-esteem, self-confidence, self-soothing, selfishness.
Most of the early ideas we have about
'talking to oneself' and 'the inner fight' and 'facing yourself' and 'moral
struggle' construct the dilemma as a binary opposition -- there is good and bad
-- and applied to society this would divide good people from bad people -- us
vs. them. Gradually this expands into
types and categories and forms. There
are morally gifted people and people who are pre- or post-moral -- something
has happened to them, or something did not happen as it should. Plato portrays moral development more as a
skill than a hierarchy -- not setting things lower or higher, but steering the
great horses of the soul.
Someone who gets the hang of this
creates a positive sense of self-responsibility and lives a good life. But this is the kind of thing that could go
wrong in many ways. The first DSM
(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is from 1952 -- this
early version hardly resembles its current form. In China, there is the CCMD
(Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders).
The ICD (International Classification of Diseases) is used in the United
Kingdom and by the United Nations. The
self is constructed differently in these various resources. Mental health is defined differently. Mental illness is defined differently. Recovery is defined differently.
Self vs. thing
As a result of a lobotomy, a patient
loses awareness of himself as a changing evolving person with personal
responsibility for the changes affecting him. He can no longer project himself
into the future or integrate experiences from the past. The person has lost
self-awareness, consciousness, self-reflectiveness – some of the psychological
attributes associated with the frontal lobes.
Deprived of the sense of continuity,
integration and stability disappear. Existing wholly in the present, the future
cannot be envisioned nor the past meaningfully recalled. The result is a loss
of ownership of one’s own mental states – a person with frontal lobe damage
inhabits kind of ghost world. In effect,
he has lost his humanity, his identity as a member of the human community, his
soul, his sense of self.
Lobotomy represents a zero point but in
many cases frontal lobe damage progresses along a continuum. Very gradually, a
person becomes a shadowy version of his or her former self. There is a
breakdown in social behavior, in initiative, in (markedly) in
responsibility. It is notable that the
break with responsibility, even though we have identified this construct as a
fiction, signals a very real developmental change. Affect becomes shallow – empathy is lost –
thinking becomes rigid – judgment becomes impaired – restlessness,
distractibility, inertia set in – finally, there is complete apathy.
There is always a new mythology of
passivity to excuse us from the problem of being a human being. Cultures make innumerable offers to ease the
burden – sometimes with explanations, sometimes with treatments, sometimes just
with beliefs. Our own bodies can cease
their magical workings and we begin to lose our amazing powers – to talk to
people, to talk to oneself, to take stuff on – or just to care of ourselves. We are so much more than a thing that
when we are suddenly treated exactly like a thing – by an accident or a crime
or a disease – we feel the infinite distance simply between where we were a
moment ago and what we have to contend with now.
Freud speculates that within all life
there is a directive to return back to inanimate matter. This is the famous death drive -- thanatos. Sartre is skeptical. A human being can never be a stone. But a stone-like person can decide to make
himself into a stone -- in an attempt to escape -- in an attempt to get away
from the burden. He thinks we are drawn
to mechanistic explanations that obfuscate the bounds of responsibility – yet
we also feel the huge gulf between being a person and the condition of inert
matter. We exist somewhere along a
continuum between hyperresponsibility and the absolute irresponsibility of
death. This is, say, the burden – tan
– 担 – something to bear -- or the road -- michi --道 – a path one may
have to take -- or we will have to think of some other language to express the
kind of bind we are in as responsible agents, moral people, human beings
rather than just being things.
Self as resources
According to current cynicism, a person
is his or her resources. You are what
you have. The Greek logic of emotional
resources – will power – is replaced by the Capitalist logic of financial
resources – money power.
Aristotle seems to support this same
line of thinking in musing about the role of wealth in the good life. Socrates seemed to argue that virtue alone,
even if one has nothing, made a person happy.
Aristotle agreed that wealth seems only a means and not an end in itself
(NE 1096a3), yet as he digs into the question, he arrives at the result that we
cannot really call a person happy who has not achieved a certain measure of
prosperity (1099a32).
Sartre defines responsibility as a kind
of “consciousness” which he thinks of as “incontestable” and “proud” and
“absolute” and thus it is not surprising that he does not connect this notion
with any material conditions at all – but instead scoffs at material conditions
with expressions such as “it would be senseless to complain about what happens
to us” and “even the worst torments do not create a non-human state of things”
and “there are no innocent victims” (Being and Nothingness, §3).
Aristotle felt that Socrates was being
pollyannish in his belief that people have modest needs and everyone prospers
in simple poverty. Sartre by contrast
seems idealistic and over-the-top in his refusal to see the impact of
misfortune on character.
The political point, from a
contemporary standpoint, is a better appreciation of the material conditions of
responsibility. Agency does not operate
in a vacuum but under real-world physical, biological, socio-economic,
historical and political conditions. Social
life does not consist of isolated acts – proud, incontestable, absolute! – but
is – to begin with – a fight with nature and scarcity. Wealth seems an
irrelevancy, yet wealth is a basic construct of the moral life. It is there
pretty much throughout history -- a fundamental category. The inequity in society is there, pretty from
the beginning. Thus the cynicism about
responsibility is ancient -- like the idea of buying oneself out of
problems.
Because I have confronted myself,
because I have built some character, because of the work, I can be held responsible for something;
because I have some experience managing these crazy impulses of mine, I can get
myself under control and act responsibly; and no one is forcing me to do what I
do – I am free -- but then suddenly I am thrown into the world, as
Heidegger says.
This is (roughly) the prelude to the
moral drama, setting the stage for taking on the burden of responsibility. We need something like a self, and a set of
values, and something like freedom, to get the ethics game off the ground. A self, values, freedom -- the point is to
see what a high bar this represents -- even without the material
condition.
The responsibility algorithm
My own intention to hold myself
responsible for my conduct is a powerful influence on that conduct.
If I think of responsibility not as a
concept, but as an action – not as something I am learning about, but something
I have to do – then its status as a fiction, as merely cultural, as invented –
is not a problem – there is no match between the word and any object in the
world. It is something I am doing.
Thus in declaring myself morally
responsible, I am not proposing a psychological hypothesis, or a medical or
legal opinion. I am making myself
responsible by my act: I make it true by being true to it. This implies that responsibility is something
like a cypher – say, like hands folded in prayer; or like a flag of truce. A white flag is not the name of anything: it is a sacred object, whose meaning lies in what
it does. It is a ritual object. The meaning of a white flag also consists in
the ways in which we are expected to respond to it – this is how we learn the
ritual – we see it done and understand.
Thus ‘responsibility’ may be defined
recursively as “the eternal right of appeal in the name of
‘responsibility.’”
To be responsible is to be
self-critical, to be unwilling to accept any edict as final – anything less
would be irresponsible.
Thus responsibility pursues an ideal
goal that cannot be defined in advance in any other way than as the limit on which the potentially infinite
process of responsibility converges.
Kant notes that a person left without
any responsibilities has in effect been stripped of all dignity. This suggests that one takes on
responsibility in order to become a human being. There is a similar idea in the Book of
Mencius: "Every man has within him the four beginnings -- of humanity,
righteousness, decorum, and wisdom -- and the man who no longer considers
himself capable of exercising these virtues destroys himself." In effect
we are talking about the assumption of responsible agency, which is at once a
complete fiction and a human universal.
Nietzsche notes that the process is
circular: "Man is held responsible for the consequences for his actions,
then for his actions, then for his motives, then for his character. Later he comes to see that he cannot be
responsible for his own character insofar as it is a necessary consequence of
influences completely out of his control.
He comes to realize that the history of moral sentiments is the history
of a fiction" (Human, All Too Human, §39).
This fiction ultimately becomes a person's inmost self. This is only to
say that the responsibility algorithm is recursive -- self-constructing -- thus
(impossibly) its own basis. e He
On this account, it doesn't make any
sense to offer reasons for responsibility -- this is not a concept one
tries to justify -- this is something one has decided to do. In effect, you don't make the case -- you take
on the case. You take on responsibility
freely -- otherwise it has no meaning.
This is to restate the algorithm.
Source code for the algorithm
Darwin sees the moral life as
founded on the social instincts, which emerged through natural selection. On their own, the social instincts have a
limited reach. Darwin saw some impact
from cognitive development on the social instincts even in events from his
time. His vision was to lift people up
from their animal origins to their higher cultural ideals -- roughly, from
their spinal cords, to their limbic systems, to their cerebral cortexes.
Triune brain theory suggests that
moral development tracks with evolutionary history, from reptile to mammal to
primate. Experimental psychology tracks
the normal developmental stages by which infants become children become
adults. Piaget models moral growth from
early stages emerging from symbiosis, to a pre-operational stage (~ age 2),
through a concrete operational stage (~
2 - 7), termed "heteronomous morality" -- otherwise "moral
realism" – morality imposed from the outside. Children regard morality as
obeying other people's rules and laws, which cannot be changed -- some or other
scary authority lies behind the rule and breaking it will lead to punishment.
Piaget observes that around age 9-10
children's understanding of moral issues undergoes a fundamental
reorganization. Children's ideas on
moral questions become more like that of adults. He calls this stage "autonomous
morality" -- otherwise "moral relativism." He sees this as the child's overcoming of the
egocentrism of middle childhood. With regard to
issues of blame and moral responsibility, older children don’t just take
consequences into account, but also consider motives. Gradually the distinction
between outward behavior and actual intentions gets formed, and so the
distinction between a well-intentioned act and a malicious act, and cases where
things turn out badly and other cases where little harm is done. Children
begin to understand that rules do not appear magically but are made by human
beings. People make rules and therefore people can change them – they are not
inscribed on tablets of stone. Older children begin to recognize that some
rules really are needed to prevent fighting and achieve anything like fair
play; they begin to form their ideas about justice.
Piaget also documents that a
significant percentage of children adapt significantly less well from
heteronomous to autonomous morality -- some aligning closer with frustration
than fulfillment -- setting the stage for the moral conflict to play out in
adult life. Lawrence Kohlberg's The
Psychology of Moral Development, from 1981, is even more explicit
on this issue. Kohlberg hypothesizes six
stages of moral development, beginning with mere obedience, to self-interest,
conformity, the law-and-order mentality, the human rights perspective, and
finally universal human ethics -- transcendening all boundaries. The model has been used around the world and
tracks fairly well against the statistical averages predicted. Notably stage six is something mainly ideal
-- only a very small percentage of people ever test at this level.
Darwin follows Newton in trying to
bring all phenomena under one governing principole. But he also rebels against the essentialism
of immutable species. He suggests that
evolution proceeds by the accumulation of minute differences between individuals,
which returns to Newton's insight into continuous variatation -- evolution is
effectively a statistical process -- this suggests that morality is effectively
a statistical process. Kohlberg assumes
that people are inherently communicative and capable of reason, and that they
have a desire to understand others and the world -- but also that receptivity
and reason and the desire to understand are all very circumscribed.
Milgram's ideas
about responsibility seem consistent with Darwin and Piaget and Kohlberg. At the root lie the social instincts. This means that the capacity for morality and
for depravity have one and the same source.
Sympathy, like love, is not enough -- reason must work on the affections
in order to extend them beyond their initial short range -- reason or sympathy
or some other principle.
Kant
represents the tradition in philosophy that speaks for reason -- Hume speaks
for moral sensibility -- both speculating on how nature gets reconstructed in
the human realm.
Skepticism
must question the assumption that reason makes the bridge between
limited affections and broader sympathy.
Plato was skeptical that Socratic intellectualism was enough to make the
bridge from rationality to morality.
Modelling the moral universe via game
theory seems un helpful in that moral intuition is always necessary to transform
merely strategic reasoning into concern for another human being. Modelling the moral universal via complexity
theory seems more promising -- to regard morality as a network of interactions -- a complex adaptive
system -- changeable, non-linear -- making emergence possible -- i.e. an entity
is observed to have a property that its parts do not have on their own --
behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact on a wider scale. This
kind of system is distinct from an ordered and a chaotic system, by the relationship that exists between the system and
the agents which act within it. In an ordered system, the level of
constraint means that the only permitted actions are those thgat are defined by
the rules of the system. In a chaotic system, the agents are wholly unconstrained,
and therefore susceptible only to statistical analysis.
The moral
universe -- arguably -- is one in which the system and the agents co-evolve;
the system only lightly constrains a person's action, and agents can modify the
system by their interaction with it -- thus e.g., self-organization and the
ability to learn, to grow upwards on the Kohlberg scale. Note also the
property inherent in complex adaptive systems of existing at the edge of
chaos -- a transition space between order and disorder -- an essential feature
of any system that lets in feedback.
Modelling the moral universe as
a complex adaptive system -- roughly as a turbulent universe with very large numbers of interacting parameters and agents -- offers the
perspective of observing when systems work, and how they get stuck, e.g. they
tend to work if flexible, decentralized,
non-hierarchical, and if they stay roughly near chaos to spur innovation -- arguably this applies to the moral system -- a model somewhere between independent agents and the determinism of an
inflexible system.
But
even this is to try to rationalize the problem or at least lay in out as an
intelligible structure. Kierkegaard, by contrast, rejected the
general approach of presenting morality in rational terms. This line of thinking seemed misguided to him
-- in a way, removing the obstacle set before one in the moral life, by waving
the magic wand of science. The problem
is not that morality is too hard for people -- the problem is that it is being
made too easy -- this is why it shrinks into nothing. It becomes nothing because no demands are made. Society should try to make some things more
difficult for people, rather than less -- like a new Socrates -- this was also the
mission that Kierkegaard set for himself -- his own particular responsibility
algorithm.
Kierkegaard argues that reason
itself shows us that the choice of an individual person must be
sovereign over all other considerations. For if one’s convictions are
rationally justified, then they must be derived from valid premises. But
ultimately the chain of reasons must have an ending. Thus we reach a point
where we simply choose to stand by a certain premise. At this point, decision
has replaced argument. Some people,
perhaps, have no other goal than their own satisfaction – what SK calls
"the aesthetic." These people live by trying to avoid boredom and
pain. But some aim for much more than this – what SK calls "the
ethical" – this is the kind of person who decides to take on onerous duties
and fulfills them. Thus the whole idea is taking on a burden, not for reasons,
not because one has to, but as freedom -- as free choice. Then the individual can take ownership of
whatever he or she decides to take on, and be responsible for, without
attempting any more to explain it.
Some philosophy of responsibility
Philosophy
can take on the moral life as a subject for reflection, but whether it does so
or not -- in any case philosophy is a part of the moral life -- that is,
the philosopher is a human being, a moral being, and is enrolled in the game
like everyone else. In the case of
philosophy, the burden -- the particular moral squeeze -- is roughly
this: philosophy is a search for truth; but philosophy also wishes to advocate
for the good, and help bring about the good in this world. Philosophy is a moral discipline in itself
and is an inherent good; yet it reaches out beyond itself, anxious to put
wisdom to use. Philosophy -- in Plato's
image -- reaches out of the cave, trying to see the light, but once the
philosopher has seen the light, there is a powerful tie back to common humanity
that draws the thinker to try to lend a hand.
This can fail in opposite kinds of
ways.
Nietzsche is a pessimist about
philosophy and is suspicious that it will fall short of its mission. He thinks
philosophy will pull up before completing its researches to support the good
cause -- whatever this may be in the idiom of the day -- so that the desire
to do good will outweigh the commitment to be impartial, think the problem
through, review all the evidence, and even entertain strong objections. “Reverence is the supreme test of integrity:
but in the entire history of philosophy there is no real intellectual integrity -- instead only ‘love of the
good’ (The Will To Power, § 460)]
Consider the case in which
philosophy keeps to its high calling and does not intervene --
Another case is, to intervene and
make things worse --
Responsibility is a risk --
There is no way to lessen this -- no
royal road --
The responsibility algorithm is one
algorithm -- one possible line of action in the ethics game. Machiavelli
warns us about the "taming of the prince" and worries that our moral
scruples may weaken us (The Prince, 1532). How do we act morally in a world dominated by
evildoers? -- He argues that there is an essential point of morality that is
undermined by any widespread non-cooperation of the people in society. He
concludes that it is folly to behave morally in such a society -- as Hobbes
later agrees in his Leviathan (1651).
This result tends to make morality impracticable in virtually every
society in history.
Actually learning social
history, we can always point to counterexamples -- people whose lives
demonstrate the power of taking on responsibility -- all of us know such
people.
In a way, every thought, every
impulse even, is a potential new algorithm -- a new pattern, a new framework
for action, a new precedent.
Francis Hutcheson, in his System
of Moral Philosophy (1755), argues that if we remove the moral motive from
society -- rethinking society outside the ethics game -- we "will quickly
lose all pleasure in conversation, all confidence in one another," and
become lesser creatures. This is a kind
of social reasoning for keeping up the conventions underlying
responsibility.
Thomas Nagel, in his study The
View from Nowhere (1986), concludes that there is no possible way to
reconcile all the different and contradictory ideas we have about
responsibility. "Nothing
approaching the truth has yet been written on this subject."
James Q. Wilson, in his fine work The
Moral Sense, from 1993, concludes with the image of a small candle flame,
flickering amid strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. Small and weak as it is, "brought close
to the heart and cupped in one's hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the
soul."
Concluding
thoughts
What ultimately is the meaning staring
at us as we inspect the inner workings of a moral idea like responsibility?
Arguably: a kind of important nonsense;
the subject of my work from 2012; as I conceive it, a wondrous kind of square
circle, that cannot be yet is, drawing us to an emotional encounter with ourselves; a deep
sounding in our being whose absence makes life less -- less human, less than what human can be -- making us lesser beings.
[i] R.E.
Nesbitt, The Geography of Thought
(New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 2-5.
[ii] John
Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge:
University Press, 2002), p. 168.
[iii] Ibram X.
Kendi, in Stamped from The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas
in America (New York: Bold Type Press, 2016), presents a torrent of
evidence regarding all these figures, and many other leading lights of Western
moral philosophy, literature and political history, documenting their adoption
and promotion of racist ideas.
[iv] Michael
Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge? Free Will and
The Science of the Brain (New York: Harper, 2011).
[v] Stanley
Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
