[psych, ethics] Fault vs. Responsibility
I had thought I'd written this one up before, but when I went to reference it, I couldn't find it, just a mention in another post that the topic was worth a post of its own. So here we go.
Fault and responsibility aren't the same thing. Fault is who owns the moral evaluation of the thing happening in the first place. Responsibility is who owns the moral evaluation of responding to the thing that happened.
Allow me to unpack that.
If you lend a friend your car, and while your friend is in a Dunkin's with the car properly parked in a Dunkin's parking lot, it's struck by lightning, your car being struck by lightning is clearly not your friend's fault. But dealing with the lightning-struck car -- calling 911 to put out the engine fire, notifying you, calling AAA for assistance, etc. -- is your friend's responsibility.
We can imagine a scenario in which your "friend's" response to the car being struck by lightning was simply to take his joe to go, and when you begin to wonder where your car is, you call him up, and are like, "Hey, dude, I need my car back", and he's like, "Oh, yeah, about that. I think it's at that towing place in Brighton", and you're like, "...what." and he's like, "It was struck by lightning, so I walked home," and you're like, "LIGHTNING!? BUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY CAR?" and he's like, "How should I know?" and you're like, "YOU MEAN YOU JUST LEFT IT THERE?" and he's like, "Hey, chill out, it's not like your car getting struck by lightning was my fault."
This last is, btw, an attempt to confuse the issue by conflating fault and responsibility, and if it stymies you, then it worked.
Also as a side note, when people say that addicts make a lot of excuses, this is usually what they're referring to: the logic that because thing 1 was not my fault, thing 2 was no longer my responsibility. This is also the origin and necessity of hardassedness in substance abuse counselors: they get pretty relentless about saying, "I don't care that wasn't your fault, this is still your responsibility." It's what can make them seem shockingly unsympathetic to third parties. I have no idea why this particular headgame is so endemic to addicts, but apparently it is.
Perhaps it's a substance-related outgrowth of a more general phenomenon: an awful lot of people get themselves hung up on the idea that the party who is at fault Should be the party to be responsible. "I'm not the one who broke it, I shouldn't have to clean it up!"
It's a nice prescriptive principle for organizing morality, ethics, and law: where it can be implemented it makes the world more fair.
However, it's also a profoundly erroneous description of how the world actually operates and can be dealt with, and if you somehow manage to cling to this belief into adulthood, it's not going to survive much past the birth of your first child: when your precious tyke industriously scales what you thought was an unscalable height to upend a bowl of cereal all over themselves and the kitchen while laughing with glee, there is absolutely no question who is at fault for there being milk and cheerios all over the floor, absolutely no question who is responsible for cleaning it all up, and they are not the same person.
It would be nice if it were the case that the party at fault will always be able to be the party held responsible, and don't for a moment think that I'm saying we should let scoundrels use this as an excuse to get away with evading responsibility for that which is their fault.
But we don't live in a world like that. One of the fundamental facts of human existence is that you're going to take responsibility for a lot of things that aren't your fault. In fact, the vast majority of things you are responsible for in your life are not going to be your fault, but, nevertheless, you will be responsible for them.
That can sound like a big bummer -- I won't kid you, it can be -- but it does come with one serious up-side. Taking responsibility for things reduces how helpless one feels. Taking responsibility is the answer to the question, "What could I do about it?" When we evade or decline responsibility, we feel that much less in power over our own outcomes: we feel that much more helpless in our lives. People who chronically don't take responsibility for things that are not their fault find themselves in a headspace of feeling trapped in their lives, with all the attendent depression and anxiety that brings. Their refrain is, "What choice did I have?" If the story you tell yourself is that things happen to you for reasons outside your control (whether malice or accident) and then therefore there's nothing for you to do about them, then that story you're living becomes a horror story pretty fast. Humans don't tolerate helplessness well.
Taking responsibility feels good because it's empowering. Because it makes you feel less impotent against the vagaries of life. In fact, it feels so good, some people wind up taking too much responsibility, such as codependents on a loved one's addiction, taking responsibility for preserving the addict's lifestyle, or over-protective parents trying to sheild their kids from every averse experience in life, or the battery victim who takes on responsibility for molifying their abuser. It's important not to take too much -- or the wrong -- responsibility, either.
It can be hard to figure out how much responsibility to take, and which responsibility to take, especially if one grew up with people who were bad at it, or deliberately obfuscated issues of fault and responsibility to get away with things (and there is a whole post worth on the topic of what we in the pshrink biz call "parentification" of children and its relationship to assuming inappropriate responsibility.)
Something that makes it much, much harder to figure out is being confused about fault and responsibility. This is another advantage to getting clear on the difference: it becomes a lot easier to reason about them, and to reason about the morality and ethics of situations. Understanding that they're two different things means you can consider them separately, and that makes a lot of otherwise stuck situations come unstuck.
It's helpful in another way, too. Going through life waiting on others to take responsibility (for making things right) for things they did (to one) that are their fault not only puts the very people who have wronged you in enormous power over you (to withhold the solution or satisfaction one craves), it is an incubator for additional resentment and rage -- the particular sort of rage that flares when one is both wronged and helpess to right the wrong. Even worse is going through life with an attitude that some unspecified other is responsible for fixing the things that happen to one that aren't one's fault. One gets all the resentful rage of the previous case, but it's not even aimed at an actual person, but at the nature of life itself. Theists in this situation typically wind up feeling resentful rage at their God(s), for that is who they see as at fault for this way things are, and then feeling incredibly guilty about it.
Letting go of the fervent sense that one is entitled to something that one is never going to get is a step towards a more peaceful life. Serenity, as they say, is the accepting of what you cannot change. One can still believe the world ought to be other than as it is, and one can still work where one can towards making the world more just, while letting go of attitude that if only one demands it hard enough, long enough, one will get what one has coming: somebody else, somebody at fault, to take responsibility for making right what was wrong.
In fact, I don't think there's any other way to engage with injustice in the long haul. Waiting on the parties doing wrong to come to their senses and take responsibility for making things right is a lot like holding your breath and waiting for someone else to faint. It's unfair, but it's generally the case that the wronged party is the party stuck with fixing the wrong. Getting hung up on the unfairness of it is the fast track to burnout; if those waters close over one's head, one will start drowning.
Fault and responsibility aren't the same thing. Fault is who owns the moral evaluation of the thing happening in the first place. Responsibility is who owns the moral evaluation of responding to the thing that happened.
Allow me to unpack that.
If you lend a friend your car, and while your friend is in a Dunkin's with the car properly parked in a Dunkin's parking lot, it's struck by lightning, your car being struck by lightning is clearly not your friend's fault. But dealing with the lightning-struck car -- calling 911 to put out the engine fire, notifying you, calling AAA for assistance, etc. -- is your friend's responsibility.
We can imagine a scenario in which your "friend's" response to the car being struck by lightning was simply to take his joe to go, and when you begin to wonder where your car is, you call him up, and are like, "Hey, dude, I need my car back", and he's like, "Oh, yeah, about that. I think it's at that towing place in Brighton", and you're like, "...what." and he's like, "It was struck by lightning, so I walked home," and you're like, "LIGHTNING!? BUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY CAR?" and he's like, "How should I know?" and you're like, "YOU MEAN YOU JUST LEFT IT THERE?" and he's like, "Hey, chill out, it's not like your car getting struck by lightning was my fault."
This last is, btw, an attempt to confuse the issue by conflating fault and responsibility, and if it stymies you, then it worked.
Also as a side note, when people say that addicts make a lot of excuses, this is usually what they're referring to: the logic that because thing 1 was not my fault, thing 2 was no longer my responsibility. This is also the origin and necessity of hardassedness in substance abuse counselors: they get pretty relentless about saying, "I don't care that wasn't your fault, this is still your responsibility." It's what can make them seem shockingly unsympathetic to third parties. I have no idea why this particular headgame is so endemic to addicts, but apparently it is.
Perhaps it's a substance-related outgrowth of a more general phenomenon: an awful lot of people get themselves hung up on the idea that the party who is at fault Should be the party to be responsible. "I'm not the one who broke it, I shouldn't have to clean it up!"
It's a nice prescriptive principle for organizing morality, ethics, and law: where it can be implemented it makes the world more fair.
However, it's also a profoundly erroneous description of how the world actually operates and can be dealt with, and if you somehow manage to cling to this belief into adulthood, it's not going to survive much past the birth of your first child: when your precious tyke industriously scales what you thought was an unscalable height to upend a bowl of cereal all over themselves and the kitchen while laughing with glee, there is absolutely no question who is at fault for there being milk and cheerios all over the floor, absolutely no question who is responsible for cleaning it all up, and they are not the same person.
It would be nice if it were the case that the party at fault will always be able to be the party held responsible, and don't for a moment think that I'm saying we should let scoundrels use this as an excuse to get away with evading responsibility for that which is their fault.
But we don't live in a world like that. One of the fundamental facts of human existence is that you're going to take responsibility for a lot of things that aren't your fault. In fact, the vast majority of things you are responsible for in your life are not going to be your fault, but, nevertheless, you will be responsible for them.
That can sound like a big bummer -- I won't kid you, it can be -- but it does come with one serious up-side. Taking responsibility for things reduces how helpless one feels. Taking responsibility is the answer to the question, "What could I do about it?" When we evade or decline responsibility, we feel that much less in power over our own outcomes: we feel that much more helpless in our lives. People who chronically don't take responsibility for things that are not their fault find themselves in a headspace of feeling trapped in their lives, with all the attendent depression and anxiety that brings. Their refrain is, "What choice did I have?" If the story you tell yourself is that things happen to you for reasons outside your control (whether malice or accident) and then therefore there's nothing for you to do about them, then that story you're living becomes a horror story pretty fast. Humans don't tolerate helplessness well.
Taking responsibility feels good because it's empowering. Because it makes you feel less impotent against the vagaries of life. In fact, it feels so good, some people wind up taking too much responsibility, such as codependents on a loved one's addiction, taking responsibility for preserving the addict's lifestyle, or over-protective parents trying to sheild their kids from every averse experience in life, or the battery victim who takes on responsibility for molifying their abuser. It's important not to take too much -- or the wrong -- responsibility, either.
It can be hard to figure out how much responsibility to take, and which responsibility to take, especially if one grew up with people who were bad at it, or deliberately obfuscated issues of fault and responsibility to get away with things (and there is a whole post worth on the topic of what we in the pshrink biz call "parentification" of children and its relationship to assuming inappropriate responsibility.)
Something that makes it much, much harder to figure out is being confused about fault and responsibility. This is another advantage to getting clear on the difference: it becomes a lot easier to reason about them, and to reason about the morality and ethics of situations. Understanding that they're two different things means you can consider them separately, and that makes a lot of otherwise stuck situations come unstuck.
It's helpful in another way, too. Going through life waiting on others to take responsibility (for making things right) for things they did (to one) that are their fault not only puts the very people who have wronged you in enormous power over you (to withhold the solution or satisfaction one craves), it is an incubator for additional resentment and rage -- the particular sort of rage that flares when one is both wronged and helpess to right the wrong. Even worse is going through life with an attitude that some unspecified other is responsible for fixing the things that happen to one that aren't one's fault. One gets all the resentful rage of the previous case, but it's not even aimed at an actual person, but at the nature of life itself. Theists in this situation typically wind up feeling resentful rage at their God(s), for that is who they see as at fault for this way things are, and then feeling incredibly guilty about it.
Letting go of the fervent sense that one is entitled to something that one is never going to get is a step towards a more peaceful life. Serenity, as they say, is the accepting of what you cannot change. One can still believe the world ought to be other than as it is, and one can still work where one can towards making the world more just, while letting go of attitude that if only one demands it hard enough, long enough, one will get what one has coming: somebody else, somebody at fault, to take responsibility for making right what was wrong.
In fact, I don't think there's any other way to engage with injustice in the long haul. Waiting on the parties doing wrong to come to their senses and take responsibility for making things right is a lot like holding your breath and waiting for someone else to faint. It's unfair, but it's generally the case that the wronged party is the party stuck with fixing the wrong. Getting hung up on the unfairness of it is the fast track to burnout; if those waters close over one's head, one will start drowning.