Jalenack | Home

I’m asking—Can any of us be held responsible for our actions?

“Of course!!” you say…duh, if I didn’t do my math homework it was just me being lazy wasn’t it? Well, look at it this way. Is it my fault that I’m so lazy that I can’t get myself together and copy a couple numbers down on a piece of paper? Say I just don’t understand this stuff, and I got home late due to various important activities, and fell asleep before finishing. Do I have an excuse? If I don’t get up early to finish in a rush am I at fault for not being motivated enough? Or is this just how I am, and there is nothing to be done about it?

There is always going to be a reason for something getting done or not getting done. If one doesn’t have the will power, or power in general, to do something, well then that person just won’t be able to do it. Is that his fault? Can anything actually be anyone’s fault, if a person is what he is? If I decided to rob a liquor store and head for Vegas, would it be my fault or am I just prone to an overwhelming hormonal rush? I think it was Kierkegaard that made the point that the only reason a person would commit a wrongdoing is if they were ignorant.

Ok, so if we can’t be blamed for anything, can we be rewarded. Hey…so I wasn’t born with supreme intelligence and intuition such as Einstein, so why does he get all the credit? So the person who sits next to me is willing to spend a whole weekend on her English essay…does that mean I’m in the wrong for not being trained to put so much emphasis on my writing? At this moment I’m wishing that I had a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, because there’s a great quote by Atticus during his closing speech. It makes the point that we are not all created equal, it’s just in the court of law. You can look at the music stars and say, well I could do that, if I had their opportunities, I could do that if I had their talent…etc. ****Not to brag…no I’m not saying, oh look at me I’m smart, Ian**** I give myself a hard time about a math test, and my score turns out to be 98. People say to me, “I hate you, you’re so smart!!” and I’m thinking…what did I do… Should I get credit for being good at math if I’m not working at it at all? Once again back to To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus doesn’t want credit for his shooting abilities, because it’s something that is completely natural, and he doesn’t feel like he should get credit for something that he hadn’t had a part in creating. So to generalize this, we could say that everything we do is driven by internal and/or external forces, and we don’t have too much control over this, so should we be given credit.

This raises the question of whether we have free will. Do we have some power as to direct the course of our lives, or are we machines? Is thought an illusion? AAAAHH freakiness he he

Ok, so say that we can’t be held responsible for anything…and weren’t…THINGS WOULD BE CHAOS! If we can’t be held responsible for anything, the justice system would be rendered irrelevant because there would be nothing to justify. Bad deeds would increase because punishment would be unjustified and that takes away a major external force that keeps the deeds from being committed. Stuff wouldn’t get done because there wouldn’t be any motivation to rise above the rest, since it would just be nature anyways. In short, it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or not. It doesn’t matter whether we can be held responsible…it has to be done no matter what. It holds us in line. If I don’t get a presentation finished in time to present it to the big time contractor and let down my company, I may have had a valid excuse, but it didn’t get done and I’ll have to be punished. Will this punishment do much…maybe not…but it is done in hopes that it will not happen again, to show how serious the misdemeanor was. Sometimes nobody is to blame, but that doesn’t mean the event can just…go away…

And this is why we get so good at making excuses…:grin: