I remember that when I first entered the preparatory class in junior high school (sixth grade in elementary school), in the first “weekly journal” assigned by our homeroom teacher (the politics teacher) — that is, a way of “snitching” (though I always talked only about “problems,” never about any specific person) — I emphasized two concepts: “the sense of right and wrong” and “responsibility.” I thought teachers should focus on cultivating these two things in students. All along, my indignation toward my peers has been far greater than my indignation toward teachers. I thought that my classmates only knew how to mock and resist teachers’ discipline, that they were self-righteous, yet they always lacked responsibility, and thus could not restrain themselves. I thought teachers should not merely emphasize discipline and control; more importantly, they should try to awaken students’ own sense of responsibility, so that they would consciously take on what ought to be taken on.
These lines of thought have continued in one vein right up to the present, except that now what I am addressing is no longer the classmates in a class, but the entire age — an age in which people trumpet “freedom” and shout about “rights,” yet forget “responsibility.” People always like to stress citizens’ “rights” — whether natural rights or legal rights; many people do not even distinguish between them at all, as if all rights were inborn. But they never mention the word “responsibility,” or only when they feel that others are violating certain rights of others do they cry out a few times about “responsibility,” as if “responsibility” were only there to serve “rights”: a person cannot be deprived of even the tiniest bit of rights, yet may entirely ignore “responsibility.” This age is exactly such a state in which everything seems to be “free of charge,” everything seems “ready-made,” as if a person ought to sing, dance, eat, drink, and enjoy himself all day long, while demanding that people must work and labor is instead the malady of this age. In fact, the malady of this age is precisely embodied in those people who fantasize like this — “entertainment unto death,” while work and labor are “alienated” into inhuman activities, activities one participates in only under compulsion, and “responsibility” is cast even farther into the heavens — work is not for fulfilling responsibility (so-called “duties”) but for making money, for obtaining power or interests.
The disease of the age lies in the forgetting of “responsibility”; “responsibility” is no longer an element supporting the “rationality” of social order, while “power” and “rights” are. And these are absolute, utterly unreasonable. So much so that some people even think that, without the support of any rationality whatsoever, one should nonetheless have as many rights as anyone else, because these rights are all inborn and require no argument — they do not even care about the contradiction between irrationality and what one “should” do. There is a phrase, “the age of the mob,” that can also be applied here — the mindset of thuggery and rascality becomes fashionable: what is mine is mine, what is yours is also mine, and anything whose ownership is unclear is something I was born to possess…
I am not saying that those who cannot provide arguments for their demands have no rights; what I am precisely trying to do is distinguish the issue of responsibility from the issue of rights. Responsibility corresponds to power — those disadvantaged groups, such as primitive tribes, and even animals, do not have strong “power,” and therefore they do not need to bear the corresponding “responsibility.” And once “rights” are separated from the question of “responsibility,” I want to place them within the realm of jurisprudence rather than the scope of ethics — that kind of absolute, natural, transcendent-over-everything, free-of-charge, ready-made, inborn right is a concept that creates confusion; the basis of “rights” always lies in the shared life of human beings, and talking about absolute rights apart from social relations is misleading. As for ethics, or discussions of morality, we do not need the concept of “rights” at all, just as we do not need the concept of “value”; the introduction and proliferation of these two words in ethics are the most typical manifestations of technological logic. Ethics should speak of “human beings,” “virtue,” and “responsibility.”
After talking so much, what exactly is the relationship between “responsibility,” “rights,” and “power”?
Many times people conflate “responsibility” and “obligation,” taking them as the counterpart of “rights.” That is indeed not wrong. But rather than corresponding “responsibility” to “rights,” it is better to correspond it to “power.”
I remember that in Spider-Man there is a line: “With great power (power, 权力) comes great responsibility,” which corresponds “power” to responsibility. We also often say “a clear division between power and responsibility,” but which “power” is the “power” in “power and responsibility” referring to? Jinshan Ciba looked it up and said that “power and responsibility” means “rights and duties,” but the English listed beside it was “[power and responsibility],” which shows that the person who compiled it made a mess of things here. Of course, Jinshan Ciba is itself a rather unreliable thing; many of the example sentences in the entry for “rights” are also written as “power.” But this is no accident; it does indeed reflect that in many people’s minds the concepts of “power, rights, responsibility, obligation” are really all a tangled mass.
Below I will focus on what exactly “responsibility” is. Of course I do not have the ability to make a deep etymological investigation, but even merely through Jinshan Ciba, through some of the meanings in modern English, one can still see certain subtleties of this concept:
Responsibility (responsibility) is not the root form; responsibility comes from the adjective responsible. The definitions of this entry in Jinshan Ciba (American Heritage Dictionary) include:
(1)Liable to be required to give account, as of one’s actions or of the discharge of a duty or trust.
Responsible, accountable: liable to be required to give an account, as in being required to account for one’s own actions or the discharge of a duty or responsibility
(2)Involving personal accountability or ability to act without guidance or superior authority:
Heavy with responsibility: relating to personal accountability or the ability to act without guidance or supervision by a superior:
(3)Being a source or cause.
Serving as a root or cause
(4)Able to make moral or rational decisions on one’s own and therefore answerable for one’s behavior.
Having a sense of responsibility, responsible for oneself: able entirely on one’s own to make moral or rational decisions and therefore answerable for one’s behavior
(5)Able to be trusted or depended upon; reliable.
Trustworthy: able to be trusted or depended on; reliable
(6)Based on or characterized by good judgment or sound thinking:
Reasonable, able to distinguish right from wrong: based on or characterized by good judgment or sound thinking:
……
What is embodied in these definitions? — self-judgment, self-accounting, self-interpretation…
In fact, responsible comes from respond — “answer, respond; [U.S.] be under obligation to…, discharge; [arch.] correspond, agree.”
That is to say, what “responsibility” means is being in accord with oneself, answering for oneself, having the ability to respond to others’ demands and make an account for the rationality of one’s own behavior.
In this way, the distinction between “responsibility” and “obligation,” the counterpart of “rights,” becomes clear. “Obligation” more often refers to the things a person must do for others, just as “rights” more often refer to the things others must do for you; “responsibility,” however, emphasizes self-assumption: whether or not others have made any demands, one must persuade oneself, judge one’s own actions, think through one’s own actions, and defend one’s own actions — this is the true meaning of “responsibility.”
January 25, 2008
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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