RESPONSIBLE TO AND FOR

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1 RESPONSIBLE TO AND FOR By Gabriel Moran The idea of responsibility is central to modern ethics, showing up in nearly every conversation on a moral issue. Everyone is assumed to know what responsibility is. The main trouble would seem to be that we do not have enough of it these days. "Why aren't people more responsible?" is the common question. But there may be a problem with the nature of responsibility, a problem that goes back about a century. One advantage of the term "responsibility" is that it embraces both factual and ethical statements; we need such bridges. A human being is responsible; a human being should be responsible. The paradoxical statement is thus true that only a responsible being can be irresponsible. This advantage of responsibility can turn into a disadvantage unless the term is carefully analyzed. When people praise responsibility they may give the impression of taking a moral stand but they are not going beyond stating a mere fact. The call to responsibility needs to be accompanied by an understanding of the quality and quantity of the relations involved. The public likes to see a government official step forward and "take full responsibility" when there is a failed policy. Often, this statement does show courage. But just as often it is neither accurate nor enlightening. For example, Janet Reno drew much admiration for taking full responsibility for the Waco disaster. A year of studies, reports and trials showed that the issue could not be resolved that easily. What Janet Reno could have said but never did was:@i am responsible for agreeing to (or not opposing) the details of the plan put before me. I am responsible for listening to X, who was ignorant of the facts, and to Y, who was lying. Those people have been reprimanded or fired. I now have better people advising me so that I will not repeat my mistake.@ Anyone who takes Afull responsibility@ for this or any complex action claims too much and usually does too little. Responsibility has two distinct moments within its scope: responsible for and responsible to. When these two moments are collapsed together, responsibility becomes a blunt instrument. Then the people who are assumed not to have responsibility are exhorted to get some. If we sort out the twofold meaning of responsible for and responsible to, then response-able suggests that a person is able to respond or to answer for an action. But before we can answer, we have to know to whom or to what we are answering. The first moment in being responsible is listening to. The second moment in being responsible is giving an answer, that is, being accountable for our actions in response to what we have heard. These two moments exist within a continuing process. My response to a person is likely to be followed by his or her response to my response. We cannot understand historical action without placing it in this endless give and take that stretches out beyond anyone's memory. In most conflicts (whether in a basketball game or in Northern 1

2 Ireland), the question "who started it?" is usually unanswerable to the outside spectator. Unfortunately, for the combatants the answer appears to be all too clear that the enemy started it. The distinction between responsible for and responsible to is not a peculiar new twist that I am trying to introduce. In almost all of the early uses of "responsible" in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word that follows is "to." Being responsible to someone or something is the first and most crucial element in responsibility. The etymological and obvious root meaning of responsible is "to answer." It refers to someone or something calling; the human being is responsible for responding to the call. What one is responsible for is the act of responding to. The human being is responsible for nothing less and nothing more than its conscious and free act of answering. We do not and cannot be responsible for the whole of our individual lives. What we do have to be responsible for are those actions over which we have a sufficient degree of control. Everyone who is beyond infancy and has not completely lost his or her mind is responsible for some actions. One does not have to be capable of doing the best thing or even a good thing, just another thing. Responsibility can be demanded of everyone, no matter what the backdrop of genetic and environmental influences. Not "you should take responsibility for your life" but "you can do something different from what you are doing right now." Everyone is responsible - to some degree - for his or her conscious choices, and no one is responsible for his or her whole life. Responsible for Others? There are occasions when other humans cannot be responsible for their own actions. We may find ourselves in the position of having to decide things for them. The substitution of our choice for another person's choice can be either temporary or permanent. If a human being is found unconscious on the street, another person has to accept responsibility for action until the unconscious person is revived. If a person is in a comatose condition which appears to be permanent, someone - physician, family member, friend or some other person - has to decide what to do. Not to turn off a respirator or feeding tube is a decision just as much as deciding to turn it off. In such cases, taking responsibility for the patient may mean accepting the fact that the patient is permanently beyond being responsible for his or her own decisions. There are many occasions where the case is not clear-cut. The aged and the sick may have a diminished capacity to choose but their wishes should be respected. A similar principle holds in regard to children, however young they are. There are undoubtedly times when an adult must substitute for the child's responsibility for acting. A parent can see that if some restrictions are not imposed (don't play in the street; don't touch the stove) the result could be disastrous. A temporary and partial substitution of responsibility for the small child is appropriate. Parents, of course, sometimes do that too often; children have to learn by trial and error. And parents can forget that their fifteen-year old is no longer five years old. 2

3 A parent may be responsible for the particular actions of his or her child, but adults are not generally responsible for the actions of children. What adults in general are responsible for is that there be a world for children to grow up into. The concern should be that political, economic and ecological systems will still be functioning in the year This criterion was well stated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "The question for the responsible man is not how can I extricate myself from this situation, but how is the next generation to live?" The human responsibility for the (nonhuman) animal world is similar to the adult's responsibility for a child. In a general way, humans are responsible for maintaining an environment in which animals can survive and flourish. Humans do sometimes become responsible for particular animals, especially those that are domesticated or are being prepared for scientific experiments. Such animals are provided with less freedom than a child, but the animal's right to live and express itself should not be brushed aside. A certain amount of negotiating is called for to decide where the animal sleeps or what it eats. To the extent that the animal cannot protect its own welfare (and only to that extent), the human being becomes responsible for the animal's actions. Human beings are most responsible for the other when that other is not a conscious being. The humans are responsible for the rivers, trees and air because they are, like children, vulnerable; but unlike children they are permanently in that position. Rivers become polluted these days unless someone speaks up for the river. Of course, clean rivers can be seen as a human good so that it may seem unnecessarily convoluted to say that someone must speak for the river. But to see all of nonhuman reality as merely means for human good is not to correct the attitude that has created an ecological crisis. Even if a body of water, a small wild animal or a stone ruin has no obvious human use, it has a right to exist in the cosmos. Here then is the paradox. We have a tendency to do exactly the reverse in what we should be responsible for. We should be responsible for our own actions; we are not usually responsible for the actions of other human beings. We should be responsible for others (human and nonhuman) only to the extent that they cannot decide for themselves. Thus, clearly we are responsible for things; we are generally not responsible for people. The opposite is what is often assumed, namely, that we should be responsible for people but not for things. The result of that assumption is a lot of meddling in other people's business, together with a neglect of ecological and organizational responsibilities. Responsible to Others? Responsibility is a religious idea that was only secularized in the nineteenth century. As a religious term it played only a secondary role; more precisely, it functioned as a precondition of the moral life rather than a central category of morality. In our modern ethics responsibility is often asked to bear the burden of the whole ethical venture, and it is badly sagging under the weight. 3

4 A drastic shift in the meaning of responsibility occurred just about a century ago. Friedrich Nietzsche was the first writer to call "man" the "responsible animal." Nietzsche is most famous for his proclamation that god is dead. Since there is no god, "man" is declared to be responsible for himself; not just this or that conscious action but for the meaning of his life. Eighteenth-century theism/deism had kept a "supreme being" in place for the masses and an easy a-theism for those who wished to assert their independence of this crutch. Nietzsche was as contemptuous of atheism as he was of theism; he did not declare himself an atheist but the anti-christ. The enemy was not an abstract concept named "god" but a Christian way of life. It would have been a large enough burden that Nietzsche offered in saying "you are not responsible to anyone, you are responsible for yourself." But he added a kind of cruel joke: as precursor of Freud, he unlocked the unconscious level in human decisions. One of his most devastating statements is: "The suspicion has arisen that the decisive value of an action resides precisely in that which is not intentional in it.". While being given responsibility for our lives as a whole, we are undermined in our responsibility for each of our actions. Thus, we are supposedly responsible for everything and at the same time we are actually not able to be responsible for the simplest decisions in our own lives. The way this dilemma has been played out in the twentieth century has been to divide the world into two abstractions: "individual" and "society." People who think of themselves as "responsible members of society" can easily grow into the illusion that they are responsible for their lives. They obey the obvious laws, they hold "responsible" jobs, they have a "successful" marriage and family. Depending on their compassion level, these Aresponsible people@ either denounce the irresponsible people or else they blame "society" for the problem and seek social remedies. Our conservativeprogressive poles of social policy throughout the last century have embedded this split. The idea of responsibility has to be refounded by combining elements of a premodern meaning of responsibility with several contemporary movements, especially feminism and ecology. Before individuals can be encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, they have to be responsible to someone or something. Men have to be responsible to women, and women to men; besides children being responsible to adults, adults have to be responsible to children. But who are the humans responsible to? The only available caller is the cycle of life and the complete display of living beings. As we broaden the scope of what humans are responsible to it will provide a narrower and clearer focus of what we are responsible for. A Christian, Jew or Muslim might say that this answer of responding to the cycle of living beings is not enough. That could be true. But the traditional believer should remember that it is not just "man" but the whole creation that is the image of God. The individual responds to God by responding to the structure of creation. Respect and care for all living beings is the basis for respecting rights and observing rules of conduct. We 4

5 have to use our intelligences to work out distinctions among rights and discover scientific knowledge of the structure of human and nonhuman natures. Discussions of responsibility are often governed by the assumption that there is Aindividual responsibility and Asocial The first is assumed to be relatively clear and easy; the second is endlessly preached at business corporations, usually to little avail. We could more helpfully analyze responsibility with a description of natural persons and artificial persons. The idea of an artificial person, that is, an organization that can be held accountable, has been part of the law for many centuries. The term should include not only business firms but all the bodily structures in which people live: family, tribe, neighborhood, city, state, religious group, political party, civic clubs, sports teams and many other organizations that shape the (natural) person's life. We have been conditioned to think that we are all-powerful in our individual decisions, and impotent in relation to Asociety's@ institutions. As the misleading title of a famous book by Reinhold Niebuhr had it: moral man exists in immoral society. This language comforts the smug and frustrates the compassionate. Both parts of the myth are wrong. We have much less control over our own lives than the myth affirms; and we have some responsibility for every artificial person in our lives. The myth encourages us either to mind our own business to the neglect of our neighbor or to take responsibility for other peoples' lives. What we ought to be responsible for are our actions within the artificial persons that connect us to our neighbors. Responsibility is not sometimes individual and sometimes social; it is always a personal response to other persons, both natural and artificial. Condemnation of "society" or "institutions" as immoral is both inaccurate and irresponsible. We have hundreds of different relations to a variety of artificial persons. Each has its own moral fiber that needs to be carefully examined before we can conclude what our responsible action is in relation to a particular form of organization. We can always do something, if only a response in the form of gestures of protest. Beyond that response, we can use our imaginations to achieve some positive effect on the largest artificial persons. It is in working with all these corporate structures that the natural person discovers a side to itself that it does not control with orders from the "will." As the natural person is the fragile but necessary rudder for artificial persons, so the human will has to be the gentle governor of the self, responsible to and respectful of the energies that do not line up behind the will's command. The "free will" of secular ethics had barely been invented before it was subverted by Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud. Every human being is captive to forces that make each choice an exercise in degrees of coercion. But responsibility does not disappear. We are responsible to a degree for an action that could be otherwise. And for everything in our lives we need lots of help - from family, friends, history, animals, trees and every artificial person we are part of. Only indirectly can we slowly and nonviolently come into a greater unity with our own mysterious selves. 5

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