Opting for Responsibility
Recall the old story about a government employee who complains to the teacher that someone at school is stealing his child’s pencils. The father explains that it is the principle that bothers him, not the pencils—he gets all the pencils he needs at the office! Of course, behavior is not always this transparent, but it does seem easier to pin down, without qualification or queasiness, someone else’s responsibility than one’s own. When it comes to tough calls, it may also be easier to get bogged down in nuances and definitions as a way of bypassing decision making. At any rate, responsibility is not as difficult to define as to exercise.
An earlier discussion organized ethical claims according to roles from which they stem and depicted them, for simplicity’s sake, as five separate clusters. By extending that image, responsibilities can be visualized along a vector that runs from the informal, personal, and self-imposed responsibility to the formal, public, and externally imposed obligation. In actuality, roles are interrelated; they interact, over- lap, and sometimes conflict, blotting out or magnifying segments of other multifaceted clusters. The result is a profusion of dos and don’ts, not all of which can be acted on simultaneously.
