Personal responsibility, or avoiding responsibility?

Great Debates
41

I think both liberals and conservatives favor personal responsibility, even if liberals are far less likely to use the phrase; but I don’t think they mean quite the same thing by it.

I get the impression that what conservatives mean by “personal responsibility” is a combination of two things:

  1. each person is responsible for their own actions, and the socially-expected results of those actions.

  2. each adult is financially responsible for paying their own bills, and those of any minor children they have.

What liberals mean by it is more like:

  1. each person is responsible for the effects of their own actions. Doing something that accidentally causes harm doesn’t make you a bad person necessarily, and avoiding it entirely may be impossible; but that doesn’t remove the responsibility, and the person who causes accidental harm should do their reasonable best to ameliorate it.

  2. each person is responsible for pulling their own weight. This may be done in financial or in non-financial forms; ‘their own weight’ is a variable measure both between people and at different points in any one person’s life; and nobody is pulling, or can pull, the whole load.

Both of these can be hard on people in different ways. The conservative attitude seems to lead to results such as: if you did poorly in school, it’s because you didn’t study hard enough, and you deserve not to be able to get a good job. If, whether or not you did well in school, you don’t have enough money to pay your bills as an adult, this is because you made some wrong choice along the way; you’ve done something wrong, and whether or not you get some form of grudging help you deserve to be denigrated for it. If you took a gamble in your life that didn’t work out (and conservatives seem to be all for encouraging people to ‘take risks’), that’s your own fault, and you deserve to be poor and to be denigrated for it.

But the conservative sense means that, if you did manage to be doing well financially, and you’re not doing anything obviously considered socially evil such as bashing your neighbor’s head in, you’re off the hook. You can keep all your money, except what you owe for services directly rendered to you, and you don’t have to spend any time or energy or money worrying about anybody else. (The hook may get you unexpectedly at any moment. But that’s usually not allowed for in such thinking, or is handwaved as something that won’t happen if you just keep Doing Everything Right.)

The liberal sense means that you’re responsible for a whole lot of other people, some of whom you know next to nothing about. If you say something innocently that damages somebody else, you ought to apologize and quit saying it, even if that means that you have trouble thinking of an alternate wording. If you discover that tuna fish caught in Thailand was very likely caught by slave labor, you’re not a bad person for having bought such tuna before you knew about it; but now that you know you ought to be looking at cans of tuna to see where they’re from, and pay extra for the ones that say they were caught and processed somewhere else, and worry that the somewhere else may not be any better. No fair deliberately refusing to look at the news so you won’t find out. And you shouldn’t complain about, and should support directly and/or vote for, money and/or time to be spent to help people who aren’t doing as well as you are; at least as long as the money and/or time to be spent won’t do you serious harm.

But when you need help yourself, you’re off the hook. Because nobody can be expected to pull the whole load, and at any given time some people can pull less than others; and that doesn’t mean they’re bad people who ought to be denigrated. As long as you’re doing your best to pull what you reasonably can, that’s enough.

42

Personal Responsibility is something you learn and develop through life, if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to learn.

Little kids aren’t capable of it, though they can learn if they are taught and fortunate to be given problems and responsibilities in line with their maturity and abilities so that they can fail and succeed and learn or grow.

You seem to think that personal responsibility is about judging other people. That is EXACTLY wrong. It is about judging yourself.
I would judge myself very poorly indeed if I were to look down on kids because they had bad parents.

43

But cutting the social safety net will directly hurt these kids. And that is something those that claim to be for personal responsibility want to happen.

44

Do you see the catch-22 in the above statements?

45

Absolutely.

46

Wait, Romney is a conservative. And apparently folks on the left think Trump is a conservative. But Romney is no fan of Trump. How can that be? It’s mind blowing - almost as if conservatism isn’t a monolithic thing! Wait, is that racist? Personal responsibility is racist too I suppose.

Personal responsibility is so blasé. If personal responsibility were not so eschewed, how could accomplishments by the individual be denigrated, and poor choices be excused?

We’re doing parody, right?

47

They tend to, I agree. I think their motives fall into a couple of categories.

  1. They social safety net is higher than it needs to be. “Nobody needs to be sitting around, drinking beer and playing PS4 while on welfare. If they can, we are giving too much.”

  2. Cutting these programs will force people off of them, and make them take care of themselves and they will end up better off in a “tough love” sort of way.

  3. As structured these programs are a disincentive to provide for oneself.
    I think 3 is true, but I think the evidence shows that these programs actually work a lot better than we have any right to expect based on how poorly they are often structured.

I think that this is true for two reasons; dealing with the government is such a horrendous unpleasant nightmare that no longer having to do so is a strong incentive to bootstrap oneself (government bureaucracy and red tape as a feature not a bug.). And, I think most people have a sense of personal responsibility and they want to take care of themselves.

I think these programs need to be the size they need to be based on the need that exists, so I’m not intrinsically for cutting or expanding them. I do think they need to be reformed and improved and aligned with economic and psychological incentives to success.

Most importantly, I think the schooling we provide the underprivileged children of this country is one of our worst sins as a society, and that needs to be fixed.

48

I agree. The very best thing we can do for the future of our society is to ensure that all of our kids have every opportunity to succeed and excel. We are falling well short of that right now.

49

What Romney gets wrong is conflating those who don’t pay income tax with those who expect the government to take care of them.
What Romney get right is that the first responsibility for everyone is to take care of themselves and their family. If everyone did that then there would be no need for other people to do it for them. The truth is that the government can’t take care of people. A welfare check is no substitute for a job. Teachers, principals, and social workers can’t substitute for involved, loving parents.
The idea that the government can take care of people if only the right people were elected is poison. The only thing that can help people is self reliance and if universally practiced it would solve nearly every political problem.

50

Is there no room for community? Friends? Neighbors? Church/civic groups?

Do you think that people often get help from those around them?

Do you think that people have a general responsibility to help those in their community?

I find it hard to believe that helping oneself and one’s family is the end of altruism in the average conservative mindset. Do you agree?

51

As many of those who do not pay income tax are his wealthy peers. Yet, they still expect the govt to take care of them. They expect roads and police and fire protection, and a military to thwart invasions, and education system to produce workers, and an economic system in which to make money.

And what Romney entirely misses is that not everyone can deal with every possible circumstance, that a job doesn’t necessarily support oneself, much less a family, without some form of assistance, and that no matter how loving, a parent needs the support of teachers, principals, and social workers to raise their child.

Right, because we would just ignore the people dying in the streets until they went away, one way or another. That is certainly a solution, and seems to be the solution that those who are currently elected are going for. Personally, I find that callous, cruel, and inhumane, and find that electing people who share the view that having the richest country in the history of the planet, and yet letting people die from lack of resources is not the country that we want to live in, will decrease the human misery that comes of enforcing your ideals of “personal responsibility” on them. Do you disagree that those who actually want to help those less fortunate them themselves are going to do more to help those less fortunate than themselves than those who subscribe to your every man for themself philosophy?
Any proposal that starts with, “We’ll solve all our problems by just getting the people to act in this way” is doomed to failure from the start, and working from that idea is either ignorant or disingenuous.

52

Folks on the right not only think that Trump is a conservative, but they think he’s a great conservative.

Your post may have been slightly relevant to the thread were it not for the fact that the great majority of your fellow party members approve of him.

What would you call Trump, and do you think that you could get that 72% of your fellow party members to agree with you on that?

53

You can approve of Trump’s job as President, and consider him not to be a conservative. I do.

54

Highlight for us which job bits of his presidency you approve of.

55

Unfortunately, this is pretty much the opposite of what Romney said. The bottom 47% who do not pay taxes are not appealed to by tax cuts, nor would anyone else who didn’t pay taxes. And of course, the notion that “many” of Romney’s wealthy peers do not pay income tax is wrong, or have not paid the taxes that go to education, roads, and schools, but even apart from that, the statement is false.

And yet religious conservatives donate more to charitable causes than secular liberals.

If you mean “this way” to include “do nothing for yourself except sit still and tell the government to fix everything, mostly with money they take from someone else”, I would agree.

Strawmanning is fun, isn’t it?

Regards,
Shodan

56

Tax cuts, foreign policy exempting tariffs, border policy, pwning leftists.

57

Can I also pick the most abused case and make it my standard to discuss?
I said nothing about I, or me at all. That is YOU, assigning guilt instead of reading what was written. We were discussing how personal responsibility was not bigoted and YOU started talking about specifics? Why?

To answer the question more directly, SNAP, any social safety net at all is perfectly fine with me but there are plenty of cases out there where personal responsibility should be a bigger value on those we are helping. Temporary assistance is great, for all the cases, even the ones you would care to define. So maybe you don’t strip kids from parents who just temporarily lost their job. What about parents who haven’t worked for a year 0r 2 or 5 years? What about abusive parents?

58

Because political philosophy is fine to discuss, but what really matters is the real world and the actual affects these philosophies have on real people. If specifics make your philosophical argument look bad, then that’s not the fault of the one pointing it out.

59

I would also be on board with a basic guaranteed income.

60

They don’t make the argument look bad, it just means that defining lines that aren’t exactly available right now (between us two Shmos on the internet) isnt going to happen.