Responsibility

[andrewducker]

This is inspired by the comment here, where ladysysiphus says "If you have consumed enough alcohol to impair your judgement, I believe you then have to take at least some responsibility for putting yourself in a position where something like this might happen."

[Poll #619684]

Comments

[nickys.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between being unwise (doing things with known risks) and being responsible for the consequences, in the sense of to blame for them.

If the bad consequences require another human being to do something bad (ie to attack you in a bad area of town) then you may be deeply stupid to have put yourself in that position, but you are not to blame for their evil actions.

Tigers, as have been mentioned already, do not have a moral responsibility not to eat people, so in that case any responsibility is yours.
(Though this does not apply to any natives of the area whose choices may be limited to either going to gather firewood in the tiger-infested woods or not being able to cook and heat their house...)

[andrewducker]

I don't equate responsibility with blame.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

In this respect, I believe you are at odds with the way the law works and most of the rest of the population think.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Pretty much what I was going to say.

[andrewducker]

And I don't really care what most of the population think. As far as I can tell, most of the population doesn't.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Well yes, sadly a large proportion of the population have demonstrated their inability to think their way out of a brown paper bag...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I'm with Andy on this one.

[andrewducker]

I'm not talking about the way the law works, and mostly I consider the law to be very odd and to contain a large number of ideas which are clearly nonsense.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The Law is also not necessarily in line with what the rest of the population thinks, as much as both of those are not in line with Andy.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

If you pop out from round a corner at someone with a weak heart, not knowing they were there, and they have a heart attack, I'd say you were *responsible* for the heart attack - an action from you caused it - but in no way *to blame* for it.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

What are the differences between responsibility and blame? How would you distinguish the two?

[andrewducker]

Blame indicates a fault in the person. Responsibility indicates that it was the person's choice.

I can choose to wander down a back alley, or not - the choice is down to me and me alone - I am responsible for that choice. But I'm not to blame if because of that I get mugged.

Generally I don't like the idea of blame - it's usually associated with punishment and other kinds of negative feedback that I find counter-productive. I prefer to find the cause of a problem, and sort that out, without having to point at someone and saying "You are a bad person."

Of course, sometimes this can't be helped, but conflating responsibility with blame ends up with a situation where you blame a rape victime for their rape, because they made an unfortunate decision.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

So ... if you are responsible for walking down a back alley, you are merely responisble for the fact that you walked in a certan direction and ended up in a certain position, and not for any of the things which may happen in that place?

[andrewducker]

Exactly. You were responsible for placing yourself in that place, not for the things that happened to you there. It may well have been a risky choice you made - and you are responsible for having taken that risk - but that doesn't mean that you are responsible for things other people choose to do to you - they're responsible for that.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Thank god! Neither do I, and I was beginning to think I was the only one. I equate responsibility more with causality - if you hadn't done x, y wouldn't have happened - but with no blame connotations. (This, incidentally, is why i didn't fillin the poll.)

I'm getting intensely frustrated with the reporting of the Amnesty poll conflating "is partially responsible" with "is partially to blame".

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Part of the survey asked is a woman totally responsible, partially responsible or not at all responsible for being raped if it is known the woman has had many sexual partners.

Is it possible to understand responses to that question using the causality interpretation of responsibility?

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

The survey has a range of questions, so the question itself makes sense. And I can see how people *could* answer at least partially responsible, in certain cases - the less clear-cut cases, where the man believed he had consent, and the woman didn't actually fight him off. (Before you jump down my throat, I don't believe this, and I would answer not at all responsible.) But if she'd been flirting madly and it was well known that she brought home a different guy every friday and saturday night, and the respondents thought that that could cause a guy to believe she wanted to have sex with him - yeah, I can see 20% of the population believing that.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

(waves hands pathetically at screen, much as Wallace would at Grommit)

No jumping down of throats, I'm just interested in the survey and how people interpret it and the questions that were asked.

I would say, for example, that the question on previous sexual behaviour is of a different quality to the others .... the others relate to what the woman is doing now (wearing certain clothing, walking in a certain place) or has done in the time immediately before the rape (flirted, got drunk) whereas the previous sexual behaviour question asks the person answering to consider behaviour which is not connected to the immediate circumstances of the rape at all.

I, myself, wasn't at all shocked at the range of responses to all the other questions (which is not to say I agreed or didn't with any particular answer but just that I wasn't surprised by them) but I was surprised by the answers for previous sexual behaviour. Also, the fact that that question was answered in the way it was would lead me to believe that many people answering the survey were using responsible more in a blame sense than a choice sense - in the sense that 8% of the respondents seem to think that sexually promiscuous women are totally responsible for being raped => worthy of punishment?

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Othen than that I would replace 'require another human being to do something bad' with 'provide an opportunity for another human being ...' I'm pretty much in agreement. I'm seeing a confusion in my LJ FL between 'being responsible for' and 'increasing the risks of'. And I think that confusion is reflected in the Amnesty poll - that at least a proportion of the people who said that they believed women to be partially responsible for being raped if they behaved in certain ways actually meant that they were increasing their risk of being raped.