In a recent conversation about global warming, my conversation partner, an old friend who is a professor of North American studies at a German university, opined that climatologists were being "irresponsible" if they contradicted the official line that climate change would spell certain disaster for the human race if capitalist industry were not swiftly reined in.
This got me to thinking about the meaning of the word "responsibility" and how it is used in everyday discourse.
Being a teacher myself, my thoughts turned first to how it is used by teachers with reference to students. Most often, it is taken as merely a synonym for obedience: a student is "irresponsible" if he does not follow the teacher's directives. It seemed to me that this was also the sense in which my friend was using the word. In her view, the stakes for mankind were simply too high for the scientific community to brook any dissent whatsoever over climate change. The matter had been resolved by a plebiscite of government scientists. All "responsible" climatologists were in full agreement on it, and those who dared to challenge the orthodoxy were guilty of a breach of professional ethics.
Webster's defines responsibility as the quality or state of being "liable to be called to account as the primary cause, motive, or agent" of a particular action or circumstance. When equated with obedience or submission, the concept therefore becomes self-contradictory: one cannot be the primary cause, motive, or agent of an action that one was compelled by one's superiors to commit, as the exculpatory cliché of Nazi officers ("I was only following orders!") suggests.
Responsibility means that one is accountable for one's actions, but this is impossible if the authority for decision making does not lie with the actor himself. In its fullest sense, responsibility means the acceptance by the actor of the full burden of this accountability, an awareness that he cannot pass the buck, so to speak, but alone must bear the moral weight of the consequences of his actions. A society of responsible citizens, then, is not one in which the masses play follow the leader; rather, it is one in which, as a rule, the individual makes no attempt to place outside himself the locus of accountability for his own decisions, nor asserts the right to have others relieve him of it. Responsibility is therefore strongly associated with such qualities as maturity, self-control, and intellectual autonomy, while it correlates negatively with dependence, subservience, and social conformity. This is why it is axiomatic in libertarian philosophy that liberty and responsibility must necessarily go together, and why Viktor Frankl said that the Statue of Liberty in New York should be offset by a Statue of Responsibility in California.
This raises an interesting question: How exactly do people learn to be responsible? Behavioral psychology offers an insightful answer. The paradigmatic example, which I first encountered during inservice teacher training nearly 20 years ago, is the way effective parents teach their children to be responsible with that most vilified of all resources — money. This example made a great impression on me long before I knew what libertarianism was, and helped prepare me for the more conceptually heady theories of Misesian economics and Rothbardian anarchism. Being simple, universal, and all too human, it has on occasion also helped me gently coax some of my more left-leaning acquaintances into softening their stance toward the "evils" of the free market.
Responsibility Training
According to standard behavioral psychology, the parents who successfully impart to their offspring the difficult and sometimes painful lessons of financial responsibility are those who consistently create situations in which the children first make decisions about money and then live with the consequences. Parents must, in other words, enroll their little darlings in the school of hard knocks.
- Children must be given a firmly set, periodic allowance. (The amount should be sufficient to cover all regularly recurring expenses, e.g. lunch money for school, plus perhaps one or two modest, age-appropriate luxuries, such as a new game or a trip to the ice cream parlor.)
- Children must be granted the freedom to spend the money without parental stipulations, interference, or ex post facto punishments (we are assuming here that six-year-olds will not be given sums sufficient for the purchasing of cocaine, semiautomatic firearms, etc.).
- When the money is gone, it's gone — all whining, nagging, and toy throwing to the contrary notwithstanding.
The applicability of this necessarily somewhat artificial pedagogical tool to the natural moral evolution of a society becomes clear when placed in the context of an unhampered market operating within a clearly established framework of (legally) inviolable individual property rights. Where the child in our example is given an allowance appropriate to his stage of development, on a free market each citizen receives remuneration commensurate with his contribution to economic production. As the child is free to spend his allowance as he sees fit, so too is the citizen at liberty to dispose of his earnings in whatever way he chooses, whether as entrepreneur, investor, or consumer. And finally, in the same way that the child was constrained not by the coercive intervention of authority figures but by the finitude of his allotment and the need to consider outcomes and make trade-offs, so the adult member of a free society must learn to make similar calculations and compromises when confronted with the limitations of his own resources and the boundary between his property and that of his fellows.
These, then, are the prerequisites for the inculcation of responsibility in the young, and more broadly, for the proliferation of accountability throughout society. Like the rose bush whose growth requires both soil and scaffolding, responsibility has little chance to develop fully without the freedom to negotiate and make decisions autonomously within a dependable framework of benign (noncoercive) constraints...Finish reading @Source
