.@Aegean

The power of nihilistic judgment. The power of negation.
Once you go nil, you can’t stay still.

Suppose you were an alien creature that didn’t speak the language of human beings. So you wouldn’t be able to understand what a human meant when he said ‘i am responsible.’ Now, what would a responsible human look like, and would you be able to spot one? That is, what about his actions would you be able to describe as responsible?

Would you understand what ‘responsible behavior’ was if you did not participate in the language used to describe it?

A trick question. Don’t answer it.

What we are getting at here is that the concept of responsibility exists only in language, only in convention, custom and habit. And outside of these things being taken for granted, it is something entirely senseless. That is to say the philosophical/metaphysical notion of responsibility is founded on an extremely complicated series of conceptual errors.

It is enough for man to continue his convention of taking/giving responsibility as he usually does… so long as he does not question it philosophically. If he does, and does so properly, he will find that it does not exist in the way he thought it did.

A test…I love tests.

I’m thinking that “responsible behaviour” means whatever the universe has decreed it to be…so there is no irresponsible behaviour, because nobody can behave other than how god created him and willed him to behave.

You see it in language and action. A person who is responsible knows that he should not have drank 10 beers and gone driving. He’s going to feel guilt when he slams into a minivan packed with kids. Because he knows the correlation between driving impaired, a choice, that he didn’t have to make, but decided to do so anyway. He knew the risks. He played dice. He lost.

The one who is not responsible, will blame somebody else, blame the minivan, blame the system, blame the judge, blame the jury, and in the end, when it still doesn’t work out… blame God! Or, if you prefer, Hard-Determinism, “Life and Existence” set you up to fail, in the end. Never your fault, always somebody else’s.

Responsibility means understanding and accepting personal choice, the choices you choose to make, and then gamble accordingly. Life is never perfect. No bet is certain. If you accept loss, when its your turn, you don’t even have to admit it, just understand it, then you have a degree of self-responsibility.

But if your mind plays tricks, on yourself, always the Innocent one, always somebody else’s fault, then you have a deficiency, a blind-spot, where it’s always win-win in your favor and lose-lose for everybody else. That’s not reality. That’s delusion. And much of humanity falls into delusion when they systemically support shifting responsibility, blame, and punishment onto others. As it is, currently, today, it’s “Victim-Hierarchy” and politicking, about who gets to be the biggest Victim on Planet Earth.

Aren’t you near the top?

OR,

Isn’t it your fault that your life is as it is? It’s not “the system”. It’s not “the judges”. It’s not “the police”. It’s just you?

Like I said…a Christian distrusts an atheist because he knows that without fear of god he would rape and kill and do all kinds of terrible things.
Same with those who deny free will.
They take themselves as an example and conclude that if there were free-will they would accuse and blame everything and everyone other than themselves.
This is what they would do if free-will were a fact. To preserve irresponsibility - innocence - they give up their blaming. They sacrifice it.
Brian did so only after someone pointed out that he blamed the police, the judge, while claiming there was no free-will - a contradiction. But he did not accept some degree of free-will. Innocence was more important to his well-being. He had to be innocent of his own circumstances. The idea that he made things happen with his conscious and subconscious choices, is devastating. That his life could have been otherwise, is too hard to even consider. He needs to believe that his life could only have been as it is…and no other way. He needs to preserve his ego, and his high opinion of himself. Because if he fucked up, then this also puts his mental quality into question. Is intelligence enough? What of self-control - will? What of wisdom, sophrosyne?
What of reading and adapting to circumstances?
What of accurately evaluating the possible consequences?

Most people understand others by using self as a standard. they an unable to empathize, so they only sympathise or antipathize. They project themselves into the others shows.
But this is not objective empathy. Empathy is indifferent, and takes self out of the equation, to understand other as he/she is.

I was going to make a similar example regarding guilt stemming from responsibility.

It’s an interesting state-of-mind isn’t it, disconnected from reality, never having to eat the costs of poor judgment???

Not only is it “Victim-Politicking” dominating this Modern-Post-Modern Era, it’s also “Privilege”. A generation of spoiled brats, without one adult to guide the mass. A truly soft generation, attempting to push costs and consequences down the road, down the road, down the road, until the price accumulates and becomes to big to pay. Who’s going to pay for it? “Don’t know! Don’t care!” Eventually, everybody pays for it.

Morality is a type of science, really, about these ‘hidden’ costs accumulating until they reach a breaking point. There are ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ generations of people, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ events in history.

Infantilism.

I think you can put a criminal in-jail, but if he is somebody who can never be responsible for himself, he’s not actually “in-jail”, not yet.

First you would have to be accountable, have Autonomy, before you could be ‘punished’ in any form. You’re not “in-jail” until you realize that some people, at least one, somewhere, somebody has to bear the costs for decisions.

It was long, long ago that Civilization began this system of ‘privilege’ where a mountain of somebody else’s choice and problem added up.

“It’s not my fault!” even when it is. There can be no “Morality” in such a mindset, one that cannot properly or accurately account for when people choose to do something, and also accept the consequences both when they win and especially when they lose.

It’s like setting up a game, and whenever you come close to losing, you just keep changing the rules.

Yes…it prevents adaptation. the individual never has to change, because he is never responsible. He is innocent, or all occurs as it has been determined, so Stoicism is the only option. Enduring one’s fate.
Preferable to the alternative. Taking responsibility begins with blaming self. What did you do or fail to do?
It pute your judgment and the brain you are so proud of, in question. It disturbs the ego.
To self-correct requires admitting something; it requires humility.

Trauma makes egos fragile. it surrounds itself with a defensive verbal perimeter, not allowing anything to pass through. This is why he laughs.
Laughter is a release of stress, kept on stand-by for the fight/flight mechanism.
It imitates sexual orgasms, with its spasmodic hyperventilating. Relief follows such events. A sense of calmness.

Why are some people Autonomous, and others not?

Why are some people aware of “cosmic” accounting, of accurately pointing to the cause of this or that phenomenon, whether they apply to humans or simply the world?

Is it nature? Genetic? Is it nurture? Memetic?

What about masses of people sitting in Church, who need a Guide, a Priest, a Leader, to delineate who is responsible for what, on their behalf?

Better to leave the thinking, the blaming, the judge and jury, to somebody else, a “higher” authority?

Is it sexist? Men or Women are more responsible than the other? Racist? White or black, one set is more responsible than the other? White Man’s Burden, where’d that come from, what’s it mean?

We can trace it back to sexual roles…and further back to the fear of death, which sex evolved to deal with.
Centuries of uncontrolled reproduction - un-culled replication of a species named human - has propagated mutations that would otherwise have result in the individual organism’s demise.
Feminization.
A psychology of dependence…due to the female’s role in reproduction and her long periods of vulnerability, during gestation and weening.
The feminine needs a master. A dominating protecting and providing Will.
If not God, then the State. It needs roder, certainty, safety - predictability. All attributes of domestication. Institutionalization.
A desire for a controlled, enclosure, with predictable routines.
Determinism.
God secularized as absolute order.

voca.ro/1SVOkExhiif

I do not click on those.
I’m sure you were brilliant.

No, because your errors - those I point out - are fairly simple. To me anyway.

Is ignorance an excuse for responsibility?

Or why is it that people attempt to know more and learn in the first place? What does knowledge have to do with morality or free-will? Does the more you know make you more free, or less free?

Morality is very extensive if and when you take it seriously. Innocent people can be jailed and punished. Guilty people can beat the system. The critique against you, Prom, is that you have/had a tendency to deny or diminish any moral judgments, dating all the way back to ILoveOpinions. And you repeat the same mistakes in your thinking, to-this-day, regarding Determinism or “Free-Will”. I think most people are beyond the black-and-white, absolute yes or no. You can deny Free-Will. You can claim Determinism. You can accept or reject Responsibility. But objectively, what’s the difference?

The example I used, cannot be compared, in the sense that some people do setup their situation, and then deny the outcomes. Doing this routinely and repeatedly, and endlessly justifying flawed premises from the start, is never going to work. Because even if a person were to lie to him or herself, then it only makes another mistake inevitable. It will happen again, eventually, because no lesson was learned. No knowledge was gained.

Freak-accidents is not a counter-argument, at least not a reasonable one. There’s always a degree of far-out randomness. That’s beside the point. The point is, when it’s mostly in your control, and you slant your mind to always win-win and never lose-lose, then you’re going to fail or crash hard, eventually. The only way not to fail, is to skew a subjective system, in your favor, hence a domesticated society.

Worshiping the mind, means only the lucid mind - Ego.
The degenerate considers himself “innocent” because he did not ‘consent’, did not offer a conscious agreement, did not consciously choose.
He dismisses the continuous automatic reactivity of the body.
He does not identify with it - see curent identity crisis - denial of the body’s judgments and reactions to stimuli. The body is not the person…only the ego is.
So, what the body chooses, how it acts, is not acknowledged as belonging to the self, by the schizoids.
The body is separate…other than.
See how a male can then claim to be trapped in a female body.

The body’s choices are not recognized as the ego’s choices. It is innocent’ of them.

Free-Will is about choices.
Each choice participating I the determination of all subsequent options to be chosen from.
Power is about having access to choices…because most of he time we are aware of options we have no power to choose.
This is the relationship of power and freedom. Increased power means more options can be chosen.

Notice the power relationship between chooser and chosen. It is ingrained in the Abrahamic psyche, and all of those tribes, in particular, cary it as an innate quality.
Messianism, salvation myths, sexual neurosis and paraphilia, all part of increasing self-awareness and an established - tradition - method of coping with it.
But that aside…
If free-will is properly defined - i.e., connected to an observable, verifiable, falsifiable, empirical action, behaviour, pattern - then not only is it not defined out of existence, but it is observable.
Choice is the action of free-will.
But people experience the consequences of their own choices, after the fact. There’s a lag between reaction, action and awareness, equal to the brain’s processing speeds - metabolic rhythms.
So, an individual experiences the consequence of its own actions and choices, as if some other had performed them in the past.
It does not accept impulsive, automated actions as belonging to itself - its responsibility. If it did not reason through the choice it denies responsibility of the consequences.
This creates a mind/body dissonance.
it is possible for the body to react and act, according to evolved automatic programming, while the mind is dominated by an ideology that is contrary to this.
Gene/meme conflict. most often experienced among nihilists.

The point is, people are either majorly in-control of themselves or they’re not. People either generally accept the consequences of “their actions” or they don’t. Now, using a freak-occurrence, being hit by lightning, is not being intellectually honest. People do not have complete control over themselves/existence/environment. There will always be areas of loss-of-control; it is within these areas that the ‘Eternal Victims’ justify the basis of their thinking, and then apply it to all other areas. Prom, weren’t you “determined” to get shot in the eye? You constantly admit to Determinism and Hard-Determinism, so yes, you were. Who determined that it would happen, or that a person should get struck by lightning, except God? Fate? Destiny?

If you insist on walking outside during thunderstorms then you should be slightly cognizant of the risk.
Yes there is a risk your bus driver can fall asleep or into a coma while driving.
Yes there is a risk a drunk driver will veer into your car headfirst on a road.
Yes there is a risk of engine failure or terrorist hijacking during a plane ride.
Yes a piano can fall on your head, out of Heaven-itself.
Yes aliens can tractor-beam your car.

Risk in existence. By accepting that risk, to live and to die, you will begin to become responsible for yourself. There is nothing “complete or absolute”. But it’s a “higher” degree than any form of Nihilism, denial, and being Eternally The Victim.

Expanding on what Aegean just mentioned… Prom and others (Silhouette),

Why are only part of “your actions” what you can take responsibility for? Why is only your conscious existence, the source of your self-responsibility, if you have any? You’re not responsible for yourself, when you can’t remember what happened? When you weren’t awake? When you were drugged? Why is it, only when you have full control over yourself, or mostly, that you are self-responsible?

Why is only the Adult version of you, responsible for yourself? If you have any degree of “Free-Will”, then why now, but not then? What changed?

Is it based on the time of day? 2:00pm to 3:00pm is the “I’m responsible for myself” hour, the rest of the day is wasted?

Responsibility is about accepting the unforeseeable as being possible.
Accepting it as part of man’s ignorance.