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First-Person Narratives

Personal responsibility

by

"Edgar Bates"

The fact is that America is faced with a shortage of responsibility at every level of society. Contrast the person at the other end of the phone that tells you the computer is down, and therefore it is your problem and not theirs, with the employee at Wal-Mart who noticing some trash in the aisle takes steps to pick it up and dispose of it. What's different can't be captured in a bottle.
In America, until World War II, the churches, the schools and the families inculcated the standards of acceptable behavior, largely drawn from the Ten Commandments. New generations learned the established and agreed upon customs of cooperative and civilized behavior very much as they learned the language. Starting with the 1970's, we have been encouraged to do our own thing and all the traditional concepts of right and wrong have been sidelined. As we are a society of laws this transition has been facilitated by advocates of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, while advocates of right and wrong are enemies of freedom. Today, the dominant leadership in society either supports or is willing to live with an opposition to standards of civic and moral behavior and an aversion of norms of right and wrong. According to James Hunter, a sense of objective morality, of right and wrong, has been replaced by a psychological approach to values: instead of being taught that there are absolutes by which they must abide, children are taught, "You'll feel better, if you do the right thing." Thus, having replaced moral concepts of good and evil with therapeutic categories of desire and feeling, we have lost the ability to instill a sense of character in young people and will likely continue to produce new generations of cultural orphans Character is about one's adherence to moral principles, the standards of conduct that distinguish right from wrong. Moral principles are not relative to the revisionist history of the moment. Children must be taught certain timeless moral principles. A lack of personal responsibility is defined when the President of the United States can admit that he lied to the American people, but urges the American people to be angry with Congress for making an issue of his lying - and they agree.
The philosophical basis of the new ethics is determinism, which can be used by supporters (e.g. B.F. Skinner) to argue that people have no control over anything they choose to do, since everything anyone ever does is the result of a chain of causes. Therefore, according to this line of argument, no one can ever legitimately be held morally accountable for anything! Therefore, to fill the void Americans have chosen to use the rule of law as the crutch to support the moral underpinnings of our culture.
Most American now believe that morality, as a basis for sound public policy and democracy in general, can be implemented only under the rule of law. Without the rule of law, there is no moral foundation. A country or President that disregards its own laws even due to expedience, compassion or morality commits the inexcusable betrayal of democracy. It is a legal process, which guarantees a uniform and consistent application and protects the inalienable rights of its citizens. Discrimination has largely been handled as a legal issue. Many "affirmative action" programs are a perversion of the concept of equality. Diversity is not an excuse to discriminate. The methods, mainly Court imposed, by which this so-called diversity has been attained have at times been significantly more important than the outcome itself.
Courts can avoid all sorts of philosophical issues, because they have available to them the "pragmatic" method of resolving legal issues, sometimes called "justice." Courts in general resolve differences by making decisions that will be best with regard to present and future needs. However, lawyers and judges often make assumptions about morality in order to decide whether the projected consequences of one decision are better than those of another. Richard Posner argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade was premature: it would have been better, he says, to allow different states to experiment with different levels of regulation or prohibition, on a "trial and error" basis, in the hope that "an answer might have emerged that would have commended itself to the Court and the nation as both principled and practical." As pragmatism replaces all reflection on philosophical issues, then there is a premium on the degree of consensus, but even judges disagree about fundamental issues of morality and value.
With winners outnumbering losers, the boom proceeds and almost everyone tolerates excesses, even moral lapses. When the laws of gravity come into play, some have argued that there will be a shift from an emphasis on material wealth to spiritual wealth. The good new is that Americans are accepting greater personal responsibility for their problems and for their actions, and they increasingly expect others to do the same. This new attitude may further affect social programs, as people question the assumption that unequal distribution of wealth is always society's fault. "We are now moving back toward the traditional American value that people are responsible for their own lives, and that the reality of life is such that there will inevitably be both winners and losers," says Yankelovich. "This conception rules out society's moral and legal obligations, but it does not rule out compassion."
Dr. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish physician incarcerated in one of Hitler's concentration camps. From that experience, he developed a new school of psychiatry; based on the premise that mental wellness is not achieved by helping the individual understand what caused his psychological problems, but by taking action to resolve the problem. When Dr. Frankl lectured in the United States, he would conclude with a plea for Americans to erect a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast because, he declared, freedom requires a balance between those two ideals, liberty and responsibility.

posted 08/20/00