What are people fairly held responsible for?

Great Debates
1

This may be too much of a broad, unfocused question, I admit. But a little rambling: in the “teenage maternity leave” thread, the OP made a comment about “rural values” that unmarried teens shouldn’t be getting pregnant warring with “liberal values” that it wasn’t their fault – that even if a teen deliberately got pregnant as a status symbol or in order to have the unconditional love of her child, these decisions were not really her fault.

If I had to list reasons I’m not a political liberal, that would probably be one of the tops: my perception that a major tenet of liberal thinking is: wrongdoing is not the fault of the wrongdoer; poor choices are not the fault of the person making them (exceptions, of course, if the wrongdoer is Karl Rove).

But – educate me. Perhaps this is a simplistic view of the world. Perhaps the belief is not as monolithic amongst liberals as I imagine.

When may society reasonably hold people responsible for their poor choices or wrong actions? Not teen pregnancy specifically – but life choices in general?

2

Liberals often get characterized this way because it’s through a filter of thinking that anyone who doesn’t advocate the “punish/dust off hands/assume the matter is done” approach is condoning wrong actions or poor choices.

I don’t condone wrongdoing or poor choices, but I do think that we should spend more time and yes, more money attacking the root causes of a substantial percentage of wrongdoing and poor choices: poverty and ignorance.

We have the choice to do some work on the front end of people’s lives to lessen the likelihood of poverty and/or ignorance, but we don’t choose to do so as comprehensively as is needed. Instead we just put them in jail or on the dead end job treadmill with frequent setbacks due to … poverty and ignorance.

So, I believe that the current approach only puts a patch on things for society as a whole, never really fixing the leaks. I also believe that there’s a certain number of people that would still end up in jail or dead end lives no matter what’s available to them. I don’t advocate coddling criminals; I do believe in preventing crime. Deterrence has not shown me effectiveness to a degree that I can be comfortable with the way it’s carried out. I’d like to think after all these centuries, there has to be more we can do other than subsidize the prison industry via neglect of our people.

Plus, it costs nearly three times as much for a year in prison as a year in college.

3

I’m a liberal, and I don’t think that’s really a “liberal value”. Obviously, if you get pregnant, it’s because you chose to take actions that made that possible (with the obvious exception of rape here), and you bear the responsibility for that (as does the father).

And, in general, a person is responsible for the choices they make. I will add a caveat, though. Marx said this, and while a lot of the stuff Marx said was pretty stupid, he hit the mark here, I think.

4

I’m a liberal.

I do think teenagers should be held responsible for getting pregnant (unless it is as a result of rape, of course).

I don’t think that means the rest of us should do nothing to help those teenagers, or actively try to make their lives more difficult.

5

The MO of the Democratic Party for the past sixty years has been to make nearly every single American dependent on its programs - that way they will be forced every time to vote for a Democrat.

You see this in everything from Social Security and Medicare to the Democrats’ support for every bit of corporate welfare that comes down the pike. And the new push for universal health care is the latest incarnation of that.

Just read Democratic campaign literature - it all consists of fearmongering - insisting big bad Republicans are going to cut or eliminate benefits. Never mind that we seldom want to or are able to do so.

So a cynical man might say that it is less urgent for the Democrats to insist on good behavior from the recipients of their largess than to just cut them a check and remind them who to vote for come election time.

6

Basic fairness – and basic pragmatism – mean that we should take into account all the root causes of behavior. If a kid has a shitty childhood among abusive parents, then no, it’s not entirely his fault if he turns out a criminal. I don’t know that the legal system has any real choice but to consider his crime to be his own fault – but we as a society have a larger obligation to consider that people are often victims of their environment. This is not so much excuse-mongering as it is an attempt to find a way out, to break the cycle of criminality.

In this sense, I see liberalism as a pragmatic response to the problem, tempered by a bit of humanity. In other words, it’s a counterpoint to the conservative’s “lock him up and throw away the keys,” which could also be construed as pragmatic, but reads as a little inhumane to my eyes.

7

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
The MO of the Democratic Party for the past sixty years has been to make nearly every single American dependent on its programs - that way they will be forced every time to vote for a Democrat.

You see this in everything from Social Security and Medicare to the Democrats’ support for every bit of corporate welfare that comes down the pike. And the new push for universal health care is the latest incarnation of that.

Just read Democratic campaign literature - it all consists of fearmongering - insisting big bad Republicans are going to cut or eliminate benefits. Never mind that we seldom want to or are able to do so.

So a cynical man might say that it is less urgent for the Democrats to insist on good behavior from the recipients of their largess than to just cut them a check and remind them who to vote for come election time.
[/QUOTE]

And this is pertinent to the OP how again?

8

I’m liberal in a lot of ways, and I think what Bricker is seeing as unwillingness to cast blame is actually just evidence of our different priorities.

The teenage maternity leave thing is one example. Calling a teenage pregnancy someone’s “fault” doesn’t help anything. We should help her finish her education, because another uneducated, unskilled person in society isn’t any good for anyone.

Conservatives are content to just assign a bunch of consequences for doing wrong, and sit back and relax while everyone does “the right thing”. That doesn’t work, though, as evidenced by the prison and recedivism rate.

A conservative’s first goal is to make everyone accountable for what they do. A liberal is more practical (never thought you’d hear that, did you?!) in that we can recognize that punishment and consequences aren’t always the best ways to prevent bad behavior.

9

[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
And this is pertinent to the OP how again?
[/QUOTE]

Seriously, I thought I had made a mistake and posted in the wrong thread when I saw that come up while I was submitting.

10

[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
I’m a liberal.

I do think teenagers should be held responsible for getting pregnant (unless it is as a result of rape, of course).

I don’t think that means the rest of us should do nothing to help those teenagers, or actively try to make their lives more difficult.
[/QUOTE]
This. Certainly responsiblity lies with the teen in question, assuming they understood the consequences and it wasn’t rape. I don’t think this is a particularly “liberal” view, but perhaps my view of liberals and the American view is a different one.

If I could guess at what the OP means, is it the kind of thing where conservatives might prefer prison time, whilst liberals would prefer rehabilitation? “It wasn’t his fault he did the crime, it was his brain chemistry/his upbringing/his peers/the situation!”. Again i’m not entirely sure that’s a particularly “liberal” view. I think i’d probably agree with what the others have said; it’s a by-product of liberals generally being the ones who want lots of tax money gathered to spend to help such people; trying to improve the situation comes across as the situation being the one to blame. But I would imagine that most conservatives would agree there are things which can increase the chances someone will turn to crime or some other poor choice. The problem is one of excluded middle; liberals want to pay to improve the situation, thus they think the situation is entirely to blame. Whereas conservatives want people to get on without handouts, and so they think the responsibility lies entirely with the person. Neither extreme is true, IMHO, and neither opinion of either side is true.

Edit: Hooray! Other side bashing within 10 posts. Nice one, guys.

11

[QUOTE=Bricker]
my perception that a major tenet of liberal thinking is: wrongdoing is not the fault of the wrongdoer; poor choices are not the fault of the person making them
[/quote]

I’m a liberal and I don’t think that way at all.

I may think about what other people could have done to help prevent the wrongdoing, but that’s not the same as saying the wrongdoer is not at fault. If a teenager got pregnant, it’s obviously her fault. But I think it’s reasonable to also discuss what others could have done to help her avoid that choice (e.g. better sex education). That’s not the same as saying it’s not her fault.

I also want to make sure that the consequences of a poor choice is limited, that there is some safety net. If someone loses his job, it’s his fault and he should face the consequences. But the consequence should be that he is forced to live on bare necessities. Not homelessness, starvation and loss of medical care.

12

To elaborate on my earlier post, the question of blame is only interesting insofar as it has any analytical use. In certain cases, blaming the offender is the right thing to do, because it means you can’t put your finger on any contributing factors that can be addressed. That’s your Karl Rove example. In other cases, fixating on blame means losing sight of important causative factors – meth addiction, abusive parenting, crappy schools, that sort of thing.

But even to this liberal, sometimes a schmuck is just a schmuck. I’m happy to join the blaming when that’s the case.

13

[QUOTE=Bricker]
If I had to list reasons I’m not a political liberal, that would probably be one of the tops: my perception that a major tenet of liberal thinking is: wrongdoing is not the fault of the wrongdoer; poor choices are not the fault of the person making them (exceptions, of course, if the wrongdoer is Karl Rove).

But – educate me. Perhaps this is a simplistic view of the world. Perhaps the belief is not as monolithic amongst liberals as I imagine.
[/QUOTE]
As An Arky said, I think you’re missing a key distinction here, between punishment and prevention. On the whole, liberals’ focus is on creating a better society. That puts the liberal’s focus on prevention - having fewer bad things happening in the future.

Since there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that greater punishments will help create that better society, the liberal’s focus on prevention and improvement deals with other factors than punishment. That doesn’t mean that “wrongdoing is not the fault of the wrongdoer” in the eyes of a liberal, it’s just that focusing on that any more than we already do doesn’t improve anything.

There’s one more key thing that eludes a lot of conservatives, and that’s the responsibility of a corporate entity. At least in the view from where I sit, it appears that if a corporation knowingly tries to sign up a whole bunch of high-risk customers to, say, a high-interest credit card, then conservatives see the responsibility for the eventual failure to pay as lying entirely with the individuals who signed up for the card, and little if any responsibility accruing to the corporation that went out of its way to put them in that risky situation. The liberal, OTOH, would place the larger part of the blame on the corporation - partly out of sheer anti-corporate prejudice, quite possibly, but also quite rationally out of the logic that the more knowledgeable party deserves more of the blame than a less knowledgeable party, and the active party, the initiative-taking party, deserves a bigger piece of the blame than a party that gives way before that initiative.

This doesn’t deny the responsibility of an individual - it just includes the corporate entity as one of the parties among whom blame can be apportioned.

(On preview, I see that Mosier, Revenant Threshold, and scr4 have all addressed the punishment/prevention question as well.)

14

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
There’s one more key thing that eludes a lot of conservatives, and that’s the responsibility of a corporate entity. At least in the view from where I sit, it appears that if a corporation knowingly tries to sign up a whole bunch of high-risk customers to, say, a high-interest credit card, then conservatives see the responsibility for the eventual failure to pay as lying entirely with the individuals who signed up for the card, and little if any responsibility accruing to the corporation that went out of its way to put them in that risky situation. The liberal, OTOH, would place the larger part of the blame on the corporation - partly out of sheer anti-corporate prejudice, quite possibly, but also quite rationally out of the logic that the more knowledgeable party deserves more of the blame than a less knowledgeable party, and the active party, the initiative-taking party, deserves a bigger piece of the blame than a party that gives way before that initiative.

This doesn’t deny the responsibility of an individual - it just includes the corporate entity as one of the parties among whom blame can be apportioned.
[/QUOTE]

Interesting that you mention this - the federal government is bigger than any corporation and has a lot more “customers”.

So corporate responsibility applies here as well.

Therefore, in matters such as how welfare policy might affect individual choices, the role of the federal government cannot be overestimated. Conservatives understood this a long time back, but a lot of liberals tended to resist this seemingly commonsensical argument, opting instead to argue for just more spending.

We see this sort of thing replicated today in things like the education debate and the Social Security debate, where it is conservatives that seem to argue for policy changes and liberals that simply argue for more money.

15

I’m a conservative and think people have to take responsibility for their actions, but I also realize that society and environment can play a major role in someone’s development. I also feel that since the pregnant girl referenced in the OP didn’t commit a crime or harm anyone but herself, there isn’t really any foul. We can either abandon her to her life, which will just drag us all down, financially and spiritually, or we can help her break the cycle she is about to enter.

The smug “superiority” of a lot of conservatives is just as repugnant to me as the “self-righteousness” of a lot of liberals. Plenty of room in the middle to actually, I don’t know…help people who need it.

On edit: What Sal said.

16

If I can go all Bill Clinton on you, can you define what you mean by “held responsible”? From a moral perspective, I maintain that people share responsibility for the predictable results of their choices. From a what-choices-should-I-make perspective, I’m not especially interested in holding people responsible in the sense of making my own choices be to their detriment, unless I believe that by doing so, I’ll ultimately help make things better. Are you talking about the former or the latter?

Daniel

17

Lot of good opportunities for reflection here, and I appreciate the contributions thus far.

[QUOTE=scr4]

I also want to make sure that the consequences of a poor choice is limited, that there is some safety net. If someone loses his job, it’s his fault and he should face the consequences. But the consequence should be that he is forced to live on bare necessities. Not homelessness, starvation and loss of medical care.
[/QUOTE]

With further thought, I think this is more the kind of thing I was thinking about. Let’s take the example of the guy that loses his job.

In fact, let’s take two guys that lose their jobs. One’s lived entirely within his means, forgoes expensive vacations and drives an older car so he has a six-month cushion of savings.

The second lives paycheck to paycheck, and drives newer cars, bought a fancier house, and takes nice vacations.

I assume you can see where I’m going with this comparison…

18

You know what? I don’t think responses to the example cited will break down on liberal-conservative lines. As a liberal, I’m prepared to say that guy no. 2 (the grasshopper) is an idiot who deserves to lose his house and fancy car. So there!

19

[QUOTE=Bricker]
In fact, let’s take two guys that lose their jobs. One’s lived entirely within his means, forgoes expensive vacations and drives an older car so he has a six-month cushion of savings.

The second lives paycheck to paycheck, and drives newer cars, bought a fancier house, and takes nice vacations.

I assume you can see where I’m going with this comparison…
[/QUOTE]
Well, neither are more at fault for the losing of their jobs. The second is at fault for the poorer situation he’ll find himself in because of his extravagances. If he came to me and said, “No, i’m not at fault, the person who fired me is at fault” I would say “No, the losing of your job is their fault (and possibly yours depending on how you lost it). Your situation’s crappiness is your own fault.”

20

You could also argue that liberals are for ‘responsibility’ (responsible use of natural resources, responsible treatment of your fellow citizens, responsible foreign policy, etc.), and that what conservatives are actually proponents of is retribution and judging other peoples’ actions, which they label ‘responsibility’ because it sounds better on a campaign button.

Of course, that argument is clearly an attempt to denigrate someone else’s worldview so I can feel better about my own, and we don’t do that kind of thing around here.