Personal Responsibility

This term keeps coming up in my thoughts. I was just asking myself what I thought was weighty enough to deserve my blog-attention, and "personal responsibility" came out louder than anything else (only narrowly drawing my attention from "Why do philosophers say so much to say so little?") So I'll ruminate a bit on personal responsibility. Grab your life-preservers, folks; I feel a stream of consciousness a-comin'... It may not be too deep, but it might move along swiftly over some rough patches.

In my previous entry I linked critical thinking to personal responsibility. It is every person's responsibility to consider all sides of an issue before forming a belief around it. The trick of critical thinking is to look around the slant and bias, beyond all the turns and twists and spins of an issue, and truly look at the issue in its raw, natural state. This takes more time and concentration than one is able to devote to any one subject on CNN's Headline News. I wonder, then -- is it is truly possible to form an educated, valuable opinion through precise critical thinking in our soundbyte-driven world? If our critical thinking abilities are hindered by our headline-news exposure, our decision-making abilities handicapped by information malnutrition, is it appropriate to call our media into account for poor decisions made by populations of voters and poll responders? Or would that be the news-consumers shrugging off our personal responsibility onto the media?

Personal responsibility and accountability seem to go hand-in-hand. Could that mean that we as human beings are unable to always assume personal responsibility if we didn't think somebody important to us would call us on the carpet?

It seems that to many (if not all) philosophers, the question does not concern the validity of personal responsibility, but rather to which person(s) we are responsible. Ethical egoists would say that I am responsible and accountable only to myself. Buddhists would say that I hold responsibility to all in the world to which I belong. Solipsism would seem to agree with the ethical egoist, since the existence of my consciousness is all that my cognition proves. Utilitarianism would split the responsibility right down the middle, making me accountable to the greatest happiness -- for all humanity, not just myself.

If all subjects taken on by philosophers are wells as deep as personal responsibility, perhaps it takes a plethora of words to draw them out. Then again, should our teachers and philosophers hold a personal responsibility to speak and write in a clear concise fashion, so as to more effectively reach our soundbyte generations?