Common sense usually recognizes, in practical matters, this
many-sidedness of responsibility. If a boy has done wrong we usually
insist, in talking to him, that his will is the cause, because we feel
that this point of view ought to be impressed upon him. But in speaking
to his parents we probably dwell upon their part in the matter, and
exhibit the boy as an almost passive agent. And again, when we come to
address the Civic Association upon juvenile delinquency, we shall take
both the boy and his parents for granted, treating the whole matter as
mainly one of better schools and playgrounds. This is a legitimate
variation of emphasis quite in accord with the organic view.
I should say that under this view responsibility is not so much
diminished or increased as reinterpreted and made a different kind of a
thing; you have to think of the whole question in a new way, which is
not less hopeful or animating than the old and much more in accord with
the facts of life. Responsibility becomes a universal and interdependent
function of mankind, in which each individual and group has its own part
to play, and must go ahead with this part, trusting that others will do
the like. The whole matter must be conceived in a spirit of fellowship.
We may blame and even punish other people; but it must be done, if it is
done rightly, with a kind of contrition, and a sense that we more or
less share their guilt, somewhat in the spirit of a good father
punishing his child. Treatment which involves the isolation or
repudiation of any individual, no matter how degenerate, can never stand
as right. We are all in one boat. Imprisonment, and perhaps even death,
may be inflicted in a way which carries an acknowledgment of social
membership, and makes it a kind of service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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