Responsibility

[Marvin Edwards]

Responsibility is assigned, either by society or by ones own conscience, to the meaningful and relevant causes of some benefit or harm. The responsible causes of a benefit are subject to encouragement. The responsible causes of a harm are subject to correction.

Consider a traffic accident, such as two cars that collide at an intersection. The investigators will attempt to identify the most meaningful and relevant causes, so that the resulting injuries and damages might be avoided in the future. Ideally, to achieve the greatest reduction in future risk, all of the contributing causes should be considered and addressed.

We would consider the traffic controls. Were the traffic signals working? Was the speed limit appropriate for the two roads? And so forth.
We would consider the automobiles. Were both vehicles inspections up to date? Were both in good working order? Did the vehicles have anti-skid braking systems? Etc.
We would consider the drivers. Was either driver intoxicated, taking disabling drugs, or otherwise dysfunctional? Was either driver using their cellphone, or otherwise distracted? Was everyone in the car wearing a seat belt? Did either driver ignore the other car's right-of-way? And so on.

Ideally, we would identify all of the contributing factors, hold each responsible for its part in causing the accident, and attempt to correct them all.

In a similar fashion, we would want to identify all of the contributing causes of a crime, hold each meaningful and relevant cause responsible, and correct them.
Judges, courts, and correctional facilities address the offender, holding him responsible for his actions, and offering him an opportunity to correct his future behavior by participating in rehabilitation programs. But we should not stop there.

We should also address the criminogenic factors in the community that raised the offender, and consider how parents, schools, churches, government, and other social influences can reduce the risk of breeding behavior that causes criminal harm.

Ideally, we would identify all of the contributing factors, hold each responsible for its part in causing the criminal behavior, and attempt to correct them all.

A person may take responsibility for their own actions, according to the discipline of his own conscience. Otherwise, society will assign responsibility to the person, "holding them responsible" for their deliberate acts.

One of my English teachers, Mrs. Vaughn, had a series of plaques on the wall, with wise sayings. The one I remember best is this: "Discipline Thyself, Or the World Will Do It For You".

 

[bilby]

Consider a traffic accident, such as two cars that collide at an intersection. The investigators will attempt to identify the most meaningful and relevant causes, so that the resulting injuries and damages might be avoided in the future.

Well that's easy. The only relevant cause was the Big Bang, and nothing can be done to prevent any future accidents, because they're already entailed by deterministic laws of nature. No deviation or randomness is possible.

Allegedly.

Anyway, that's what I plan to tell the judge when I am on trial for causing death by dangerous driving. Obviously, I can't cause anything, including (but not limited to) death.

I shall be sure to scream "No deviation is possible!!" as they drag me to the cells.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Consider a traffic accident, such as two cars that collide at an intersection. The investigators will attempt to identify the most meaningful and relevant causes, so that the resulting injuries and damages might be avoided in the future.

Well that's easy. The only relevant cause was the Big Bang, and nothing can be done to prevent any future accidents, because they're already entailed by deterministic laws of nature. No deviation or randomness is possible.

Allegedly.

Anyway, that's what I plan to tell the judge when I am on trial for causing death by dangerous driving. Obviously, I can't cause anything, including (but not limited to) death.

I shall be sure to scream "No deviation is possible!!" as they drag me to the cells.

Right. That's why the Big Bang is not a meaningful or relevant cause of any human event. How would we go about correcting the Big Bang to produce a better result? We can't. So, while it may be considered an "incidental" cause in the chain of causation, it is certainly not a relevant cause of any human event.

And if the hard determinist wishes to use universal causal necessity to excuse the thief for stealing our wallet, then it also excuses the judge who cuts off the thief's hand. Generally speaking, universal causal necessity is morally irrelevant. Only specific causes are correctible.

 

[Jarhyn]

Consider a traffic accident, such as two cars that collide at an intersection. The investigators will attempt to identify the most meaningful and relevant causes, so that the resulting injuries and damages might be avoided in the future.

Well that's easy. The only relevant cause was the Big Bang, and nothing can be done to prevent any future accidents, because they're already entailed by deterministic laws of nature. No deviation or randomness is possible.

Allegedly.

Anyway, that's what I plan to tell the judge when I am on trial for causing death by dangerous driving. Obviously, I can't cause anything, including (but not limited to) death.

I shall be sure to scream "No deviation is possible!!" as they drag me to the cells.

Right. That's why the Big Bang is not a meaningful or relevant cause of any human event. How would we go about correcting the Big Bang to produce a better result? We can't. So, while it may be considered an "incidental" cause in the chain of causation, it is certainly not a relevant cause of any human event.

And if the hard determinist wishes to use universal causal necessity to excuse the thief for stealing our wallet, then it also excuses the judge who cuts off the thief's hand. Generally speaking, universal causal necessity is morally irrelevant. Only specific causes are correctible.

Or as I like to say, "if the outcome has not been optimized".

Whatever optimizes an outcome is responsible for it. We know that existing as we do, we optimize the system to an output. We perform regulatory control.

We can identify the source of regulatory control to an outcome, as you say, the "responsible agents", the energy accreted within space and time whose particular presence as a part of the state necessitated the outcome by the laws of physics.

This means that when someone is responsible for something: we can meaningfully respond to it, such as to regulate and control it.

For now we can content ourselves to discussing this with respect to 'goals', which are built on a reification of 'success' by some mechanism or definition.

But this is why compatibilism is important: it allows discussion of goals, and later the abstraction of the concept of goals to find out what is true not just of A goal object but of goal objects in general, and so a logical discussion of ethics.

 

[steve_bank]

Another form of the determinism vs free will debate? Are all human actions predetermined?

Forensic analysis of a car accident is called root cause analysis. What set the accident in motion. For a car accident the root cease analysis can lead to an improvement in cars and road system safety, but the primary result is assigning criminal and civil liability.

Theoretically you can trace causation back to the formation of the plamet and beyond. That gets us nowhere in the issue.

Social cuastion is complex and I doubt there is any single causation to crime. If you eant to argue social cnditions at the bottom for crime, then how do you explain upscale white collar crime? How do you explain Donald Trump born into prvilegde and never wanted materially?

Drug addiction has become viewed as a disease not a bd choice. Is someone generically predisposed to violence and addiction?

It was covered in an old Law And Order episode. A defendant's lawyer argued genetic predisposition and lack of any responsibility.

The prosecutor argued if that is an acceptable defense then the entire justice system collapses. Nobody is at fault for anything, there is no responsibility.

If that becomes a norm then undauntedly people will do things knowing responsibility may be avoided.

If you are driving too fast for weather and road conditions or are DUI knowing the consequences and get in an acicdent then you are criminally and civilly responsible for consequences. Few would argue otherwise.

If you commit crime knowing the legal and criminal consequence are you not as responsible for consequences? I have to say yes.

I don't know if it was enancted. Here in Seattle there was talk of letting people go for stealing from stores if they have a need.

 

[Jarhyn]

One thing that I find interesting is that, given a tight enough definition of "freedom", "will", "choice", and "goal", "responsibility" gets captured under the purview of Representation Theory, allowing us to address ethics not as "relative morality" but as "general ethical theory".

It lets us assess the relative compatibility of goals, the unilaterality of goals (see also "left limits" and "right limits", "surjective" and "injective", and other such discussions of symmetry and joinder, though it is unclear to me what the exact homology here would be), and the discussion of error in navigation towards an entropic state that maximizes the number of mutually compatible states...

To me it all speaks to the idea that "ethics" is just yet another discussion of ways to apply algebra, here around the idea of "ought".

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Another form of the determinism vs free will debate? Are all human actions predetermined?

That's not my intention. Jaryn had suggested a thread on Responsibility, and since that was something I had given some thought to, I posted this thread. Bilby brought in the hard determinism angle, probably as a joke.

Forensic analysis of a car accident is called root cause analysis. What set the accident in motion. For a car accident the root cease analysis can lead to an improvement in cars and road system safety, but the primary result is assigning criminal and civil liability.

Hey, thanks for the name of the operation! I found the Wikipedia link to Root Cause Analysis. It's a great article.

The key message for me is that a system may have multiple points of failure. Fixing any one of those points may be temporarily effective, but fixing all of them provides the maximum risk reduction.

They give the example of a machine that experienced overload and blew a fuse. Replacing the fuse would solve the immediate problem, but what caused the overload? It was caused by a failure in the lubrication system. The lubrication pump was failing due to a pump shaft that was rubbing and producing metal flakes that clogged the pump. And that clog could have been detected if the pump was inspected every 6 months instead of every 2 years.

Social causation is complex and I doubt there is any single causation to crime. If you want to argue social conditions at the bottom for crime, then how do you explain upscale white collar crime? ...

In today's society, there are both public and private welfare agencies that will prevent anyone from starving. Housing is still a big problem, though, and there are many people living on the streets, or in their car.

But personal attitudes, prosocial versus anti-social, play a significant role. These are best addressed through cognitive behavior therapy and by community adoption of prosocial values and giving all children the tools needed to succeed in the world.

I suppose responsibility begins at home. What are we willing to do to make the world a better place for all of us.

 

[steve_bank]

It is not academic or under an -ism. It is real world issues.

If yiu assault me on the street I will do whatever I have to do to protect myself. I am not going to cosider if the guy is having a bad day, if his wffe keft him, or if he is drunk. I have a right to protect myself.

If someone repeatedly casualty people and commits other crimes society has a right to protect itself and remove the person from free society. We see it in catch and release here. People are arrested and released, and immediately commit another crime. Does it matter if tey feel no resposibility?

It is society as a whole that defines what responisbulity means. Like all social, legal, and civil issues. Take away the prociple of [ersonal responsibility and civil order evaporates.

On anotyer tread I said if you use recretional drugs consder where the money goes, back to drug cartels for one example. Brutal and murderous people. A person on thread said essentiallyy so what.

A lack of personal impressibility.

The flip side is the responsibility of society in general.

Thomas Moore wrote around the time of Henry 8th that society creates the conditions into which people are born who may have to commit crirme just to survive, then punishes them for it.

We are no so bad here today that anyone is starving to death but the qiestion is the big one.

There are stsitcs that can be inteprrted as saying after birh control became legal crime dropped. Less numers of kids grwing up unwanted and neglected.

In a recent school shooting the shooter was a 19 year old graduate of the school. He said to one student 'Are yiu ready to die?. In anote he said he was the pefect strm for a mass killer feeling alienated and alone.Who is at fault? Parents Culture? That should give us pause and question ourmodern culture.

There are people unqualified to raise kids and do.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

... In a recent school shooting the shooter was a 19 year old graduate of the school. He said to one student 'Are you ready to die?. In another he said he was the perfect storm for a mass killer feeling alienated and alone. Who is at fault? Parents Culture? That should give us pause and question our modern culture. ...

Exactly. There are studies of ways to remedy social conditions that breed criminal behavior. Wikipedia has an article on Community Crime Prevention.

And there has been a lot of research on recidivism and the factors that need to be addressed, such as these:

"interventions and programs should target criminogenic risk factors—those areas highly correlated with criminal behavior. Criminogenic risk factors include those items we have already discussed, such as antisocial attitudes, antisocial peer associations, lack of education, and lack of employment."
Latessa, Edward J.; Listwan, Shelley J.; Koetzle, Deborah. What Works (and Doesn't) in Reducing Recidivism (p. 37). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

 

[Jarhyn]

Responsibility and Power

So, I mentioned goals, which I think serves to be discussed in yet another, different thread once we have explored the idea of responsibility to it's inevitable conclusion now that it has been identified as a function of will, which "statements" in it are inevitably going to be "free", and some goal, namely "oy, hey you, stop that!"

Responsibility for doing something apparently is always in the context of some agent with the power to take power over you, opposing your goals or continuation of the machine that produces goals such as yours.

This would tend to suggest that structures of power are where responsibility always inevitably comes from. Well, at the very least it's where the response part comes from. As to whether you have a responsibility to yourself... Well, that has to tie in with a good long conversation about goals and "success".

And this means that power is also a discussion that must be had.

Personally, I found  The Tombs of Atuan a very serviceable discussion on the topic.

"Power to" is... Well it's like the accessible region of a truth table. Where can you send the state to, from where you are, assuming yourself as a black box, and thus smearing out the deterministic system into a locally probabilistic one.

IOW: What paths can you walk? What are the consequences of walking the state to that place on the basis of inputs you have control over, in terms of the traversible horizon at that destination?

It's a big question. This sometimes includes "power over", that places you can access on this state transition tree will chop branches off of the state transition trees of other entities. In fact that you constitute a wall there, should you so choose, and the wall may be visible or not.

Where in this truth are you provisionally free to go? Where will you actually end up? Will you find yourself in a hall staring at a door that wasn't locked when you decided to go but is locked now?

Power to. Power over.

But for this reason these powers are a source and result of responsibility, because they constitute where responses come from and how, with respect to goals.

In many respects some of the first hints come here in how to parse treatment of goals in a general way.

We can identify trivially as people we have conflicting goals, even within ourselves.

Indeed this again points at the need to investigate goals more deeply, and see what that investigation brings back to power and responsibility.