Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
1/We assign responsibility to people as a function of how much we think that responsibility can change their behavior. Ill behaved children and the mentally ill? Our responsibility judgment 'passes through' the individual into the parents, or to shitty brain builds.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
2/We 'pass through' responsibility for people in hard situations; the harder the situations, the more the responsibility passes through. We 'pass through' less for anyone with power - teachers, police, parents. This is all kind of weird, because ultimately-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
3/People's choices are a result of concrete things. You pass responsibility through the shitty child to their parents, but decide not to pass responsibility through them to *their* shitty parents. Why? Decisions like these are heavily decided by cultural norms, and-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
4/you can find different cultural agreements about where the responsibility gets placed. Some cultures don't pass responsibility through shitty children at all, and instead blame the child completely for all of its actions. Conservatives tend to do less responsibility
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
5/pass-through; the individual gets to be responsible. Liberals tend to pass-through a lot; there are reasons for behavior and we shouldn't blame you. We pass through responsibility way more for women, who get lighter prison sentences for the same crimes and have issues with
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
6/sex and body image passed through to culture/men. We let responsibility stop with men, who get mocked if they support stuff like #notallmen. I suspect this is why stuff like libertarianism tends to be more masculine - both of them deal with responsibility landing with "you".
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
7/ Also why socialism tends to be more female-supported - for women and socialism, responsibility passes through "you" into society or authority or whatever. But if you look around, you can see constantly little decisions for where to let the responsibility land, all the time
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
8/and for me it's seeming increasingly weirder, and more revealing of our incentives, where we want to focus blame (and power!), and ultimately an arbitrary tool used to guide social norms for deeper purposes.
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Maxim Lott (MaximumTruth.substack.com)
@maximlott
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
From a utilitarian perspective, there is an optimal way to distribute blame according to this framework. Whatever leads to the best incentives (e.g., don't blame a kid or mentally ill, because blame won't change their actions. Do blame the professional who should know better.)
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@maximlott
I think I like this, but something feels missing to me. Maybe it's due to the extreme difficulty of actually knowing how much blame changes behavior? Or to what extent this is desirable?
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Dimensional-Analysis
@ZenPyschedelics
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Well if free will is an illusion which I'm pretty sure it is then you could argue that no one should take responsibility for anything but this isn't practical and I think the only way to improve your life is to take responsibility for it. Just blaming society gets you nowhere.