Comment by 47282847
3 months ago
> Because with property rights comes responsibility
Response-ability. The ability to respond. Which you have, if you want it or not, for anything and everything you can respond to.
You see children on the streets getting beat up? Your response-ability. You see someone throwing garbage to the ground? Your response-ability.
What you DO with it, whether you act on it, or you deny to have it, doesn’t matter. It is purely the ability, the capacity to. And not responding is also a response. We typically share response-abilities with others around us who are similarly capable. Ownership doesn’t inherently come with increased response-ability. Power does.
Maybe you are confusing responsibility with (legal) liability?
See also: Duty to rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue - at least as applied and lived in EU, LatAm, Africa; and some US states on paper
responsibility:
> "fact or condition of being responsible, accountable, or answerable," from 1780s.
and in the mid 1790s it meant "that for which one is responsible; a trust, duty, etc."
i am not sure where you're getting this "ability to respond" idea from. i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans, unless we go back to being tribal.
The key point in the etymology is "that for which one is responsible" you have to actually be responsible for some "thing" to have any responsibility.
even "Response" comes from re- + Sponsor, which:
> The general sense of "one who binds himself to answer for another and be responsible for his conduct" is by 1670s.
i am not bound by anyone else on this planet, thanks very much.
> i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans
I don’t consider it to be something that “works” or not, or an ideal, but as fact of reality. The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not. Your action or inaction will have real world consequences. Whether you can or will be held accountable is independent from that, or what framework you apply to evaluate a “good” response.
We don’t have to agree on definitions of words but that’s not the point I’m making here, which is based on reality/fact/capability to react and respond to an external stimulus. And for those (re)actions you and only you are responsible, as a fact of life, whether you want that or not. Which is how those two definitions relate.
> The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not
have you really, truly, thought this through? There's hundreds if not thousands of things I could act on right now. I'm not responsible for any of them.
is this like a corollary to "being heroic is being selfless and ignoring the consequences" or something? Is it a generalization of "stimulus/response"? "branching multiverses"?
what i am getting at here, is: is this a circular "you have a responsibility because you can act, therefore you can act because there is a responsibility", is it so generalized as to be meaningless? is it just a misrepresentation of "you can only control [are responsible for] your own actions"?
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