BEING RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE

A sign of our being fully human is that we act responsibly. In an older sense of the word, 'responsible'  means that one is liable to be called to account. This usage stems from the law courts, where an accused person can be accounted guilty or innocent only if responsible for his/her actions, that is, if it can be demonstrated that there was deliberate intent and prior knowledge.  

In ethics these conditions have long been seen as necessary for an action to be a human act. We may say, then, that moral responsibility, in the sense of answerability for what one does, refers to the conditions required for any human act. A moral decision must therefore be responsible. It must be taken freely and with knowledge of what is being chosen. This is not in question, but in the modern context responsibility means much more than this.  

In the past the role of law has figured largely in the elaboration of the concepts, not only of conscience, but of responsibility as well as of justice and guilt. Today theologians understand responsibility especially in the sense of response. It means response to good, not only the absolute good, which alone is capable of determining our willing (and which, if we are religious persons, we identify with God), but all those basic goods and values which are the essential goals of human living.  It is a response to the good of moral truth, the truth of living together in love. If to be human means to be a member of the human community, as well as of all those smaller communities, such as family, political society, parish, labour union, then to be human involves responding as we should to the demands of community life in all the ways we share in it. This is why prominent theologians like Bonhoeffer and Barth, Häring and Schillebeecks, see responsibility as the essence of Christian ethics.  

Moral prescriptions help to guide us in our response to the good, but laws and rules of any kind tend to narrow down to lists of prohibitions, so that human living runs the risk of settling into a thoughtless routine without a capacity for vital adaptation. In their positive content they remain fairly general and cannot adequately direct the concrete response to ever-changing needs. What moves us to positive action is the good, and the good for us is concrete, to be discovered and discerned creatively by each of us individually and by all of us working together to promote the human condition. In this context moral responsibility is a creative response arising out of our very humanness and constituting us as fully human persons.  

Being responsible in this creative way is in fact the due exercise of our freedom, which is rooted in the very mystery of our personhood and chiefly relates to the search for the values proper to the human spirit. What is in point here is not freedom in the commonly accepted sense of liberation from the restrictions and constraints that inhibit growth to personal maturity. Obviously, maturity is rendered difficult of achievement, if not impossible, in a situation where one is put under undue pressure from forces outside the self, for example, useless regulations, unjust social structures or an authoritarian regimen. History furnishes us with innumerable instances of the struggle to be free of such limitations of the human spirit. But at a deeper level maturity involves gradual liberation from growth inhibiting forces within the self, such as irrational fears, crippling anxiety, prejudices, emotional instability, evil habits, psychological obsessions and compulsions, in a word whatever within us that is unauthentic. The struggle for freedom in this domain is ongoing and unending.  

Freedom in the sense of liberation from what Juan Secundo calls 'the determinisms with which we work, think and feel' is then an indispensable condition for the exercise of moral responsibility; it is not moral responsibility itself. Moral responsibility is the exercise of freedom in a positive sense, freedom as self-determination, freedom as challenge to be answered and task to be achieved, freedom as quest for properly human goods and values, including the value of moral truth, for 'It is in accordance with their dignity as persons – that is, as beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility – that all should be impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth' (Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae, n.2).  

Moral responsibility, therefore, is not only creative; it must also be objective. In searching for the truth we are confronted by a transcendental reality, which lays an unconditional claim upon us. There is no question of reducing morality to purely subjective choices or merely arbitrary decisions.  

The author F.F. Crowe illustrates this point by showing the progression in the different levels of consciousness in the human person. In contrast to inanimate objects like a stone, we are enabled to see the star in the sky because of the starlight falling on our eyes – so we experience the physical universe. In contrast to irrational living beings like a dog, we are able to inquire about the same star, to ask 'what is it?' and 'why is it?' - so begins all science and philosophy. At a third level of consciousness we can conclude our inquiry about the star by an affirmation of fact: 'it is; this is truly, or at least probably, what it is and how it came to exist' – so we make judgments on the universe that exists. At a fourth level of consciousness reflection about the world that is leads us to conceive the world that might be and through our intervention would become – so we make the transition from 'is' to 'ought' and judge that 'this is what I ought to do in this situation'.  

It is precisely at this point, Crowe says, that the responsible human being emerges. But, just as our eye does not make the star able to be seen; just as our intelligence does not give intelligible form to starlight; just as our judgment does not make the star exist, so what is possible for our world is 'linked inexorably to what is, the ideal is the further potential of the real, and the ought-to-be is discoverable in the complex of our world and our relation to it'.  

At this level we may say that values are created, but that is not to assert that they are purely subjective. The maturity and responsibility of our practical judgments about the human values we ought to realise in our world (and so of ourselves as persons who make these judgments) are not measured by our liberation from objective truth but, as Pope John Paul II stresses, 'by an insistent search for truth and by allowing ourselves to be guided by that truth in our actions' (Veritatis Splendor, n.61).  

                                                                                               Brian Lewis, Ballarat, Australia