Our activities can moreover trigger a form of chain reaction of other effects (indirect consequences). If we scold a child it will possible hit a fellow schoolchild on the way to school, it may annoy the teacher and do badly in a test. This raises the question therefore of the extent to which we are responsible for the consequences of a causal chain of effects. How much should we consider the possible consequences of our decisions?
Since we do not perform many of our activities in complete isolation, but for example within the family or in a company, it is surely also of interest to see how much of the responsibility we carry for the consequences of those activities, which we carry out as part of or as a member of a group (family, department, firm, society etc.). In other words this concerns something like our «collective responsibility» for the activity of a group in which we are involved in some form. To introduce us to this subject let us consider the following examples:
A company manufactures and sells a product, which amongst other things can also be installed in equipment for warfare. The company supplies such products to a country which later uses them for a warlike dispute.
Question: Does this company in any way share the responsibility for the consequences of this war? If yes, who within the company carries this responsibility? Is only the board of directors responsible or does the cleaning lady, who contributes to the function of the company with her cleaning work, also share the responsibility?
A woman sells potatoes on the market. Amongst other customers she also sells potatoes to someone who later robs a bank.
Question: Does the woman who sold the potatoes to the person who later robbed a bank have any co-responsibility for the bank robbery? Would it be any different if the woman had sold him a gun and not potatoes?
In the following pages we will concern ourselves with this question of who has the responsibility for something. In this consideration we don’t just want to know who is to blame but rather to what extent we should also consider the possible consequences when we make a decision. Because that for which we are responsible is decisive for our development.
As a first step it is necessary to clarify what is meant by carrying the responsibility.
We also carry the responsibility for these effects. On the basis of the examples given above it should be clear that «to carry the responsibility» or «to be responsible» is a priori neither positive nor negative. It is simply an impartial statement.
In clarifying the responsibility we are each time considering an effect which has already happened, a consequence or a result, and we ask who has contributed to this result with his decisions. Those people who have contributed to the given result with the decisions they have made – whether consciously or unconsciously, are responsible for this result. We thus assume that there will be an effect and ask ourselves which people have directly or indirectly caused this effect.
Let’s consider three other examples:
The lunch dishes are still standing on the table in the evening. Who carries the responsibility for this? Who has eaten, should someone have cleared up and if so who?
The baby in the pram wears gloves. Who is reponsible for this, i.e. who has put them on or not taken them off?
A man eats spaghetti in the canteen today for lunch. Who is responsible for the fact that he eats spaghetti?
We have deliberately selected three not very spectacular examples so as to clarify that we are really responsible for everything we do or do not do. Thereby it is necessary to distinguish clearly between liability and responsibility: We generally use the word liability in connection with negative events to clarify questions relating to guilt. Responsibility however is far more comprehensive, it is not about guilt but rather the question of who has contributed to a given event with his decisions.
It is moreover impossible to withdraw from this responsibility in any way or form or to arrange insurance against responsibility in the same way that you can arrange personal liability insurance. As soon as a decision we have made has contributed to the result, we are personally responsible for it (see below). Whether other people have similarly contributed to this result is of no importance in the consideration of our responsibility. Here is another example of this:
A person falls on the pavement and remains there - lying down. The first three passers-by see the person lying on the ground and continue onwards without doing anything. The fourth person who happens to pass by helps the fallen person back onto his feet.
The first three passers-by have not done anything, they are responsible for the fact that they did nothing. The fourth person had decided to do something and is responsible for the way he has treated him. Thereby there is nothing to suggest that the first three people had acted incorrectly and the fourth person correctly. In this question of responsibility we are not concerned with right or wrong but merely the question of who has contributed to a given result with his decision. We are seeking the people who bear the (shared) responsibility for causing a certain effect, a certain event or a certain result. This is completely independent of whether the considered effect in our view was positive or negative. We are only concerned here with who contributed to this effect with his decisions.
There is a close relationship between the development of a person and the decisions for which that person is responsible. In the previous chapters we have compared personal development towards harmony and peace with the construction of a pyramid. We set one stone in place upon another and hence build up our pyramid. The building stones of this pyramid are the deeds and decisions for which we are personally responsible. If we respect the basic rights of existence in our deeds and decisions, then additional building stones will be created which we can set in place. If we violate the basic rights of existence, then what happens is just the opposite: Building stones which we have already inserted will fall out, and we will have to acquire the corresponding characteristics and abilities we require to live the basic rights of existence again in other situations, so that the pyramid can be repaired again and correspondingly built up further.
We must however point out again that the building stones for our pyramid can only be created from decisions for which we are personally responsible. This consideration of responsibility should therefore in no way encourage the idea of passivity according to the guiding principle «I will be responsible for as little as possible». Such passivity would hold back our personal development and in no way would it foster it. It is only our own activities which can develop us further whilst at the same time following the basic rights of existence. The more decisions for which we are responsible the fundamentally greater are our opportunities for development! We will therefore discuss in the following sections under which conditions it is sensible to carry out an activity or when should we actually not carry out that activity. Essentially this means that we must set our opportunities for development against the development risks.
Clarification of our responsibility can help us in retrospect to find out whether in a given situation we have respected or violated the basic rights of existence. As a much more important aspect of this however, it should permit us to clarify the extent to which we are responsible for our behaviour and the direct or indirect consequences of it. As we have seen above, our future is influenced by everything for which we are responsible. How far in advance therefore should we consider our decisions? Because of the powerful interrelationships on the earth it is quite possible to continue to develop any of the previously-used examples so that the person, who initiates an activity, would be responsible after a certain time for everything which happens on the earth! As an example of this let’s take again the man who eats spaghetti in the canteen for his lunch: He sprays sauce on his shirt, the shirt is washed with a washing agent which pollutes the water courses, the polluted water reaches the sea and hence the food chain. The water evaporates from the sea and later is precipitated in the form of rain somewhere else on the earth again. After a certain time practically the whole earth is affected or influenced in one way or another. And all this, only because this man ate spaghetti on a certain day!
However it cannot really be as bad as this, limits must be set on our responsibilities somewhere. Where these limits are and how we can find and change our own limits of responsibility will be discussed on the next few pages.
As already indicated in the previous section, a decision we make often triggers other events. A further practical example from the family: The cat chases after a bird. As a punishment the owner doesn’t give her anything to eat, and because of this the cat steals the meat which is waiting on the table for the family’s lunch and on top of this, it also knocks over the bowl containing the pasta. The family react irritably, the children begin to fight etc.
Because of the tremendous amount of interlinking on the earth, our decisions often result in many additional consequences which we ourselves may not even notice, and for which we certainly didn’t strive. We presumably did want the immediate consequences of our decision, otherwise we will have made a blind decision, i.e. we would have made a decision without knowing what we wanted to achieve with this decision.
In the above example with the cat the owner gave the cat no food as a penalty. As an immediate consequence the cat suffered from hunger. This would certainly have been clear to the woman as she had decided to punish the cat in this way. The fact that the cat would then as a further consequence «remove» the family’s lunch (first indirect consequence), was however presumably not so easy to foresee and certainly not the further consequence that the family would react irritably (this statement would be incorrect if this same event with the cat and the lunch had already happened many times before