The recent outraged response over the plea bargain for two boys who killed a Dover store owner raises one of the most vexing questions humans face: At what point, and with what penalty, are we fully responsible for our actions?
"Full responsibility" frightens most human beings. It means, simply, no excuses. Very few people want such an unforgiving shed light on them, and will look for ways to soften and share the blame. This is the nub of the argument between the judge and the defendants' attorneys. The judge says they're fully culpable; the attorneys say that a bad home life, an unloving mother, a generally uncaring universe means that the boys don't fully own their behavior or their moral deficits.
The judge is more right than the attorneys. These boys did it, they reveled in it, they even paid their rent with blood stained money. In other words, they knew what they had done and they should face that know ledge for the rest of their lives. But in the less extreme realms where most of us live, what "full responsibility" means is not so clear. Most of the time we don't have access to complete information about the state of our mortal beings. Yet we're expected to have full knowledge of and control over all our actions and their consequences, even if we're not aware of what all our actions do. This is a harsh ideal. There is a way to humanize it without taking away its moral importance.
Full responsibility is "fuller" the closer it is to your personal life because you have more power to determine whether you will hurt or help someone. If you lie to a loved one, and the lie is found out, then you are fully responsible for all of the distrust that follows. You used your power to break the trust, and you own the entourage of guilt that goes with it. If you eat tuna fish caught by fishermen who kill porpoises in their nets, you are only indirectly responsible for their deaths because your power to change the situation is limited (though not completely absent). In short, the more able we are to help or hurt someone, the more responsibility we have to accept for our actions or inactions. The boys are completely responsible for their crime because they had it within their power not to kill the woman, and they chose to kill her.
We have more much power over the lives we lead than we think we do. Accepting full responsibility for our lives does not only mean accepting guilt or blame. It also means that we must, as often as we can, choose to create light rather than darkness in the circles where we live. Choosing light is a disciplined act; it's a decision not to give in to entropy. We must treat each other well, or we will certainly treat each other badly.
February
Abortion