How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for?
This matters because, looked at negatively it coincides with what we may be blamed or be held culpable for, and looked as positively it coincides with what we might be praised or given an accolade for. This in turn, respectively, brings about things we might be expected to feel guilty about, feel the need to make amends for, learn from, think that being punished is not out of order, and then conversely brings about things where we might rightly feel good about ourselves, satisfaction, and that praise or a reward may not be out of order.
The negative aspect of responsibility is perhaps more significant in our lives than the positive.
On the positive side people can feel miffed and undervalued if they are not thanked for the good they do, but many people take the view most of the time that the good one was responsible for is reward enough in itself, and further acknowledgement is not necessary, indeed might be an embarrassment. At worst one might feel miffed and underappreciated and give up one’s successful deeds.
On the negative side a failure to correctly ascribe responsibility can be downright harmful, indeed it might tend towards harm accumulating because the person who brings about the harm never sees certain results of their actions as their responsibility, and so sees no reason to learn from those actions or change their ways. Having the incorrect attitude to responsibility, to misunderstand what one is responsible for, is itself, at another level, a failure of responsibility. One has to be responsible for one’s view of responsibility, just one has to be responsible for what one is responsible for.
The minimal and the maximal view
The minimum view of what one is responsible for is that one is responsible for only that which one intends. By intention is meant that one held an objective in mind and then sought to bring it about. A surgeon removes a heart from a person with the sole intention of having a heart to study and of course the person dies; but on the minimalist view the surgeon is not responsible for the death as it was not anything he intended. The maximal view of responsibility is that one is responsible for all that may be causally traced to oneself. A person goes in for a heart operation, and several days later, he examines the stitches in his chest, but in doing so he takes his eyes off the road he is crossing and gets run over by a bus; the surgeon is responsible for the accident as the stitches were put there by the surgeon, and without them the person crossing the road would not have been examining them. Neither of these views can be right. The first minimum view makes one oblivious and responsibility free what whatever follows from one’s actions or inactions that are bad provided one did not intend it, …
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