Consider if you will gentle reader that attributions of responsibility can be grouped along a continuum ranging from virtually no responsibility (think, ‘fatalism’) to freewill choice. Now the person who is going to judge (i.e. answer the question: Who is responsible?) will, man or woman, reside along this continuum and hence this will significantly determine the judgment offered. For example, one convinced that behavior is determined by the position of the stars at one’s birth may not be so harsh with judgment. It is also possible (or is the word ‘probable’?) that a person committed to deterministic doctrines may also be a more lenient judge. I am now thinking of the ancient Greeks who held a strong belief in determinism (framed in terms of uncontrolled causality, the gods or the fates). For the ancient Greeks this framework served as the intellectual background against which freedom could be measured and contrasted and then responsibility assigned and punishment rendered [you might remember that Socrates got himself in a bit of bother because he preached ‘free-will’ and ‘free-choice’ – i.e. each of us is responsible for our choices and actions]. Even today there are those who believe that a certain woman who once resided in a certain garden is ultimately responsible for all of the evil in the world [no wonder we men did not want to give ‘them’ the vote or full citizenship].
In determining who is responsible consider the attitude of the judge toward the category into which he fits the person’s behavior significantly influences his or her judgment. For example, a judge might believe that overt aggression is an act of evil. On the other hand, for many of us it n seems that a person is judged to be evil if he or she cannot provide a rationale and rational defense for behaving aggressively [e.g. when it appears clear that one or more alternatives to being aggressive were open to the person or when the person does not condemn his or her own conduct or when the person is reacting to a nonaggressive stimulus or when it is judged that the person is deliberately choosing to harm another, an ‘innocent’].
We cannot leave certain acts – we call them atrocities – unjudged. We cannot dismiss the actions of Mr. Bliss (the slave merchant), Lieutenant Calley (My Lai), Adolf Eichmann, the Germans who executed more than three hundred Italian citizens outside of Rome in 1944, nor those of so many others who professed to be innocent of evildoing because they were ‘following orders’ or because their intentions were socially acceptable to their peers. Call the evil that they commit ‘banal’ (see Hannah Arendt) AND that does not excuse them. So we keep searching and we keep asking. . .
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
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