Responsibility
I've been thinking about responsibility, lately, and the steps leading up to it.
The first, and most tenuous, is causal involvement. Say that I'm out for a stroll, when a neighbor tosses a lit match out his window, setting me on fire. Certainly, if I had not gone for a walk, I would not have been lit on fire - but I had no reason to suspect that such a thing might happen. I was causally involved, but that's all.
From there comes a gradual shading into more and more potentially informed action. If I know the neighborhood kids are pyromaniacs, I might have some inkling that an evening stroll could result in a firey demise. Had I seen them cobbling together a flamethrower just this past afternoon, that inkling is apt to become a somewhat stronger suspicion. On a purely practical level, I might choose to remain in my home to avoid encountering them.[1]
However, being potentially informed - or even fully and actually informed - of a danger does not necessitate moral responsibility.[2] If I do choose to go for a walk, and the neighborhood pyromaniacs choose to immolate me, that is their fault. Lighting people on fire is wrong, regardless of how well I could have predicted that they might do so, regardless of whether I could have - on a practical or causal level - prevented it by staying in that evening.
These three things seem to get conflated a lot. I frequently see people beat themselves up over things they had no responsibility for; sometimes even for events they weren't causally involved in. (Usually with "I shoulda...")
They also get conflated in less self-directed ways - a discussion on rape is what got me thinking about the topic.
In cases of rape and sexual abuse, our culture has a nasty habit of looking at the potentially-informed decisions of the victim: everything from questioning "what was the victim doing/not-doing which caused this to happen?", to reporting on what the victim was wearing, to full-out victim-blaming.
These matters are completely and utterly irrelevant to the moral responsbility borne by the rapist(s). They're separate things. It doesn't matter if the victim was waltzing naked and drunk through the worst city in the world with a big tattoo saying "I LIKE SEX"; it's still rape, the perpetrators are every bit as reponsible for their actions, and bringing up the victim's decisions that have nothing to do with moral responsibility is at best muddying the waters and piss-poor timing.[3]
Even if I were to douse myself in gasoline before taking a stroll, that does not in any way give you, the neighborhood pyros, or anyone else the right to light me on fire.
Except that analogy falls short: there's no real reason I'd want to douse myself with gasoline, contrasted to, say, a woman wanting the freedom to go for a walk at night, wear comfortable clothing, or simply, y'know, be female.
[1] = And, presumably, call the cops.
[2] = Being informed doesn't necessarily mean a lack of moral responsibility, either - there are certainly cases where it's relevant. If I take my friend's car out for a spin and the neighborhood pyros torch it, I do bear some moral responsibility, because I took a knowing risk with property that wasn't mine. If I bypass a bunch of warning signs / safety precautions and startle someone while they're welding, I bear some or all of the responsibility for whatever burns I receive, because the other person not only made no effort to harm me, but specifically tried to mitigate the risk to me, which I then thwarted by my actions. I suspect these sorts of cases (where there's entanglement between the two concepts) are a large part of why the notions tend to get conflated in people's minds.
[3] = The message "behavior X is dangerous" may have great value in the context of prevention. But when dealing with a crime that's occurred, that's no longer the context.
(Many thanks to wavyarms for some sanity-checking and discussion on this post. It's changed substantially since she saw it; all screwups are mine. :)
The first, and most tenuous, is causal involvement. Say that I'm out for a stroll, when a neighbor tosses a lit match out his window, setting me on fire. Certainly, if I had not gone for a walk, I would not have been lit on fire - but I had no reason to suspect that such a thing might happen. I was causally involved, but that's all.
From there comes a gradual shading into more and more potentially informed action. If I know the neighborhood kids are pyromaniacs, I might have some inkling that an evening stroll could result in a firey demise. Had I seen them cobbling together a flamethrower just this past afternoon, that inkling is apt to become a somewhat stronger suspicion. On a purely practical level, I might choose to remain in my home to avoid encountering them.[1]
However, being potentially informed - or even fully and actually informed - of a danger does not necessitate moral responsibility.[2] If I do choose to go for a walk, and the neighborhood pyromaniacs choose to immolate me, that is their fault. Lighting people on fire is wrong, regardless of how well I could have predicted that they might do so, regardless of whether I could have - on a practical or causal level - prevented it by staying in that evening.
These three things seem to get conflated a lot. I frequently see people beat themselves up over things they had no responsibility for; sometimes even for events they weren't causally involved in. (Usually with "I shoulda...")
They also get conflated in less self-directed ways - a discussion on rape is what got me thinking about the topic.
In cases of rape and sexual abuse, our culture has a nasty habit of looking at the potentially-informed decisions of the victim: everything from questioning "what was the victim doing/not-doing which caused this to happen?", to reporting on what the victim was wearing, to full-out victim-blaming.
These matters are completely and utterly irrelevant to the moral responsbility borne by the rapist(s). They're separate things. It doesn't matter if the victim was waltzing naked and drunk through the worst city in the world with a big tattoo saying "I LIKE SEX"; it's still rape, the perpetrators are every bit as reponsible for their actions, and bringing up the victim's decisions that have nothing to do with moral responsibility is at best muddying the waters and piss-poor timing.[3]
Even if I were to douse myself in gasoline before taking a stroll, that does not in any way give you, the neighborhood pyros, or anyone else the right to light me on fire.
Except that analogy falls short: there's no real reason I'd want to douse myself with gasoline, contrasted to, say, a woman wanting the freedom to go for a walk at night, wear comfortable clothing, or simply, y'know, be female.
[1] = And, presumably, call the cops.
[2] = Being informed doesn't necessarily mean a lack of moral responsibility, either - there are certainly cases where it's relevant. If I take my friend's car out for a spin and the neighborhood pyros torch it, I do bear some moral responsibility, because I took a knowing risk with property that wasn't mine. If I bypass a bunch of warning signs / safety precautions and startle someone while they're welding, I bear some or all of the responsibility for whatever burns I receive, because the other person not only made no effort to harm me, but specifically tried to mitigate the risk to me, which I then thwarted by my actions. I suspect these sorts of cases (where there's entanglement between the two concepts) are a large part of why the notions tend to get conflated in people's minds.
[3] = The message "behavior X is dangerous" may have great value in the context of prevention. But when dealing with a crime that's occurred, that's no longer the context.
(Many thanks to wavyarms for some sanity-checking and discussion on this post. It's changed substantially since she saw it; all screwups are mine. :)