Do we have any responsibility for problems not of our making?
Joss Wildgoose Bulloch
Responsibility can be both an obligation to act and not act – to support someone and condemn another. Responsibilities can be thrust on us, taken up ourselves, expected of us. Assuming that we wish to leave the world a better place than as we foun d it, the ‘maker’ of problems should seek to solve them , even though, through reasons of death, incompetence, a gap between cause and effect, this is not always possible. Those, however, who allow the mess to remain are complicit and therefore responsible for the events that occur as a result of their inaction; they had the solution but refused to use it. The rejection of action against evil or destructive forces is complicity in the continued existence of that force. If you encounter a murderer and refuse to report them to the police or take other action, you are complicit and partially responsible for everything that occurs thereafter. If you encounter a banana peel on the floor and refuse to alert others who later flip and fall, you were partially responsible for that accident. Although you are not responsible for the murderer’s homicidal tendencies or the banana peel, you are aware of the environment you inhabit and it is your responsibility to take precautions. Although it is not your fault that a crime occurred should your bike be stolen, the safety of your bike was your responsibility and you should have taken precautions to guard against it. You should not be forced to take action – it would be considered a violation of your freedom for someone to force you to save a drowning person because you are the only onlooker who can swim, but you would be expected to – this is the ‘reasonable expectation of responsibility’. Complicity in crisis is an abdication of moral action, and therefore an abdication of your responsibility. A key example that poses an issue today: climate change. Many people living today – the most recent generations – did not have the ability to address climate change when it began to show signs of problems that needed addressing. They were not in government; they did not have institutional positions of power such as being professors or managers; they did not have the wealth or influence through mechanisms like home ownership or having a swing vote that they needed to extract policy change. They did not have the power to address the activity of unregulated industries in the global south which abused the environment nor polluting industries in their own countries. This was mainly because they were either not born, children, or very young adults – without power. The climate crisis was not of their making. Nonetheless, living and producing within the system makes you complicit in the structures of the system. If it was neoliberal economics and industrialization that partially caused the climate crisis, then by consuming and producing under this system, you became complicit in the continued existence of the problem. Corporations, one of the major forces behind environmental and atmospheric degradation, do not pollute because of hedonistic or sadistic reasons; they pollute because they have a profit incentive as the cheapest and fastest methods of production and distribution are often the most environmentally destructive; they do not want to fall behind their market competition by using more expensive but environmentally-friendly business practices. If there was a consumer boycott of environmentally-degrading companies, companies would be forced to improve their practices or fail
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