The Responsibility Deficit
It is generally accepted that we are all responsible for our actions.
Except for when we’re kids, that is.
When you are a minor, you are absolved of at least partial responsibility for what you do. The young get breaks, lighter sentences, second chances and are afforded a number of clemencies they won’t get when they’re grown up. It feels instinctively correct that children should bear less responsibility than adults. Our common sense confirms it, too. They are less capable than adults. Even the law upholds a difference in its different treatment of the two.
But if responsibility is something you can arbitrarily reduce, perhaps it is an important quantity we should take greater pains to measure and account for, especially since we are indulging to adjust its value as often as we do.
From the perspective of a child, we know only that some responsibility has been lifted from us. We may measure it as lesser punishment. But as an amount of responsibility taken from our shoulders, we have no clue where it has gone.
From the perspective of the parent, we may know how to reduce the responsibility of the child (again, as lesser punishment), but we may not know how to increase it upon ourselves. As parents, we may not even be aware that there is an inescapable connection between reducing responsibility in one person and increasing it in another.
Let us pretend that there is a fixed amount of responsibility — for clarity’s sake, let’s call it blame hereforward — and that you cannot decrease blame here without increasing blame there. Blame is unpleasant, as we all know. It makes sense that we would try to take advantage of as many opportunities to shed blame as we possibly could. It also makes sense that we would do all we could to avoid taking blame. In a society like ours, where we have many kinds of personal and legal circumstances where the blame of a person is diminished, you can expect that some significant amount of blame is sitting unclaimed in a pile on the floor.
Now I’ll go back to calling blame responsibility.
The relationship between parent and child in many ways reflects the relationship between the citizen and the state. The kids are taking advantage of every opportunity to duck responsibility. But the parents are not really taking it upon themselves, either.
Thus, there is a responsibility deficit.
Like other types of deficit, the responsibility deficit can only be corrected by a willingness to work hard for little reward, at least for a while.
Parents will have to work harder to develop in themselves a feeling of permanent responsibility for their children. This becomes especially difficult for a parent once the child is no longer a child, and is presumed to bear full responsibility for themselves. Likewise, as children become adults, they will have to work harder to assume 100% responsibility for themselves, though they know their parents bear some amount. If both conditions are met, there is an overlap. The sum of the responsibility bourne by the parent and the child is greater than 100% — there is a surplus of responsibility.
It is a popular conundrum to try to reconcile man’s “free will” with the knowledge that God controls everything, at least popular among those who believe in God. “How can I bear any responsibility…” the pious person may ponder “when I know that it is all decided for me beforehand?”
The more powerful our parent seems to us, the more we desire that they take the responsibility (the blame) for the bad things we may do.
We can blame our parents for a great deal. But we can blame God for everything. Thus, in great piety there is the capacity for great evil. But because the debt of responsibility this evil creates is assigned to God, it just disappears, unpaid.
To a less extreme degree, but far more commonly, we excuse our personal foibles and weaknesses as inherited things, and defer the burden of responsibility to our parents, a debt they have no capacity to pay.
Both ways, blame is assigned but the responsibility is written off.
It is clear that we understand how to hand-off responsibility, even when we should not.
Let us now think of better ways to reward those who take responsibility, when they don’t have to.