Who’s responsible? Who’s to blame?

We’re constantly cautioned against “blaming the victim,” and that admonition seems to have made many people gun-shy about assigning responsibility at all. Despite the fact that responsibility and blame are sometimes closely related, a critical distinction between the two is often overlooked.

Blurring the distinction is the way many people use terms imprecisely in common speech and then try to build ethical arguments on those imprecise terms. Ethics, as any other discipline, requires precise speech. Running to a common-use dictionary rarely helps, because those dictionaries usually explain how people use the words in everyday speech, rather than give a philosophically helpful definition.

“Responsibility” as well as “responsible” are words that have a wide variety of meanings. So much depends on the use in a specific situation that any single definition is likely to be misapplied or, even when applied properly, to fall short.

We can talk about a “responsible person” as someone who can be counted on. Or we can talk about a “responsible person,” meaning someone who has caused something to happen. We can talk about “responsibility” as reliability, accountability, or merely causality.

Let’s suppose that on my way home from work I stop at a less-than-savory bar for a cold beverage. I leave my barstool for a few minutes to go to the men’s room and neglect to take my change, which is sitting next to my drink. When I return, my money is gone.

Am I responsible for the loss of my money? Absolutely. If I had not left it there, it wouldn’t have been stolen. People can say that I should have been more careful or prudent or wise. I should have known better.

Am I to blame for the loss of my money? No. The person who took it is to blame. I should have been able to leave my money for a few minutes and find it there when I returned.

What’s the difference? In terms of my being responsible, I am an important actor in the causal chain of events. My leaving the money there was necessary to establish the set of circumstances that ensued. Had the money not been there, it would not have been stolen.

But although I was careless or imprudent, I did nothing morally wrong. There is nothing that says I can’t leave my money sitting on the bar. In fact, if I want to take my money and run it through a shredder — supposing that I have no obligations regarding the money — I can do that. It’s not a moral issue.

It would be a different story if it were your money that I was safeguarding and I were careless with it, resulting in its loss. In that case, I do have distinct obligations regarding how I treat the money, and leaving it subject to theft might change the way we look at it.

The person we want to blame in my barroom scenario is the one who took the money. That is the person who bears a large share of the responsibility, but who also did something wrong. Whether or not I left the money on the bar, that person should not have taken it. And that’s what blame is — saying that one, or more, of the people in the causal chain did something that was morally forbidden. In this case, stealing the money.

So I did something foolish and imprudent, and I was partly responsible for losing my money. The thief did something wrong and was not only partly responsible, but was also to blame.

One problem many people have with assigning responsibility and blame is that they see it as a zero-sum game. They think that to assign any responsibility to one party somehow reduces the amount of responsibility — and perhaps blame — on someone else. That’s just not true. In fact, we can add people to the scenario without diminishing anyone’s responsibility or blame — although when we get into very large numbers of people we seem to have difficulty keeping things straight.

Granted, in any chain of causality some people will play greater or lesser roles, and some people have a connection so tenuous and remote that it’s hardly worth considering. Suppose the thief who stole my money was supposed to have had a dental appointment that afternoon and was in the bar only because the dentist had come down with a cold and cancelled all appointments.

Had the dentist kept the appointment, the thief wouldn’t have been there to take the money. So even though the dentist’s catching a cold was a factor, we’d be hard pressed to say anything negative about the dentist’s behavior. It just wouldn’t be germane to an ethical discussion.

On the other hand, suppose the thief were on a prison work-release program and the guard who was supposed to be watching the thief went shopping, leaving the thief to his or her own devices. The guard would then play a big role in the causal chain and, because of a responsibility to watch the thief, would also be assigned some blame. Again, doing so wouldn’t in any way diminish the thief’s responsibility or blame, but would simply add to it.

Once we’ve settled the responsibility vs. blame confusion, we can apply these concepts to other situations. For example, we can explore whether a system or an institution contributes to the behavior of people within that system or institution. To say, as in the case of the Enron scandal, that “the system” is somehow responsible for what took place — and maybe even partly to blame — doesn’t mean that individuals are off the hook. Those individuals who did something wrong should shoulder both the blame and responsibility for their own actions. But that doesn’t mean that the system wasn’t responsible and that we shouldn’t look at changing the system too.

You can write to me at [email protected] or join our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .

Source: www.infoworld.com