Complex Numbers

Behave

Time now for another prompt from "JAFBG"  [XGC]

There are many influences on a person's behaviour and personality - their upbringing, stress, mental health issues, pain, etc. At what point do you feel a person has to take responsibility for their own behaviour?

One might be tempted to conclude that someone, like myself, who doesn't accept the idea of free will, would think that the logical conclusion is that none of us are responsible for what we do.

This is arrant nonsense. Not that we don't have free will—that debate won't be settled anytime soon—but that we're not responsible.

The way I look at it, what we do have is knowledge of potential consequences. As a simplistic example, I like to drink, and I like to drive, but I never combine the two because I know that a) it's hazardous to other, uninvolved (some might say "innocent," but that's misleading) people, and b) there are severe penalties for it.

Lack of free will is no excuse for behaving badly. It's not a ticket to licentiousness or a justification for choosing that pizza over a big steaming plate of broccoli. (It also doesn't mean that our actions are predictable, any more than you can predict where an individual raindrop will fall during a storm. But that's irrelevant to the prompt.)

It doesn't mean we can be irresponsible or avoid facing consequences. The awareness of potential consequences is baked into the background of every choice we seem to make. In other words, just because we could not, in hindsight, have taken a different course, doesn't mean that we can't strive to do better in the future, with updated experience and knowledge.

That said, there are people who are genuinely unaware of consequences: the very young, for example, or the mentally ill. Where those lines are drawn can be (and often is) debated. So you ask me: at what point does a person have to take responsibility for their own behavior? Well, at all points... with exceptions. Even the US legal system recognizes that; you're not fully responsible until you're 18, and you can be declared incompetent even as an adult. The default, though, is that every person is responsible once they pass that magical milestone. Except, of course, when it comes to drinking; then, it's 21.

We've also decided, as a society, that self-inflicted disinhibition doesn't absolve one of responsibility; see, for example, my drinking and driving note above. That extends, in my view, to acting like an asshole because "that's just who I am."

So, to sum up, I don't fucking care what your excuse is; if you know it's wrong, don't do it. And if you do, accept the consequences.