Self responsibility

post by Elo · 2024-06-19T10:17:35.268Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

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I see a modern puzzle of "self responsibility" which gets tricky quickly.  At all times a person has responsibility to themselves. From child to adult, you are “self responsible”.  It always applies.

When a person isn't of a sound mind, they are still expected to maintain their responsibility but they may simply be unwell. Unable to be responsible for themselves or their actions.  

As a society we prepare for a few times when people don’t have responsibility, for example being drunk or a minor.  For minors, we expect parents to care for them until they are old enough to be responsible for themselves, we build schooling institutions to guard children for a while too.  For drunks, we make duty-of-care (temporarily) as part of the deal for the people who serve alcohol.

But we as a society also are not prepared to deal with people who are not drunk, not underage and also not self responsible.  People who might be able to be self responsible but just aren't.  Immature or having a mental break, Society isn’t ready for them.

At this moment in time, there's no one else who automatically assumes personal responsibility for you. There's no service or system that is designed to stand in for self responsibility, nor is it something we can expect to systematise permanently or somehow magically assign to a service.

We can implement some solutions. We can set up expectations. We can plan to support people to live a neutral/positive existence, force them away from negative existences (by outlawing drugs, gambling, violence etc). But ultimately pushing people into neutral/positive existences (aside from being an unhealthy attitude of control over people's autonomy to make bad choices) would be leveraging goodwill from the humans whose job it is to provide services like medical or psychological counselling or other support services. If there exists in the world, a black hole of self responsibility, it's very hard to fill for an individual and especially for a society to do it on behalf of an individual.

Unless someone else comes along and says, "I'll do responsibility for you for a time, until you can take it on".  But people who do that are likely to want to benefit from their efforts.

This is independent of the specific condition that may cause a lack of self responsibility.

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Beyond basic responsibility, a more mature adult can take more responsibility. They can extend their capacity further and further, leading empires and communities and visions that extend far out. The scary truth is, some people never become mature adults. Some people dip in their mature capacity for a moment, and other people climb up and then keep climbing…

Maybe the most important kind of positive expansion of self responsibility is when one person expands their responsible capacity to have enough responsibility to cover for a partner, and beyond that, potentially to children as well.

It’s possible (biologically) to have a child before having enough space capacity for personal responsibility to be able to do good by yourself, the child and the rest of society, but ideally there is enough space, time, money and all the other resources needed to have personal responsibility for yourself, your family, your friends and your children.

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