When is a Man Responsible?

Beginning the time a man reaches the age of reason he (she) was taught that they are responsible for any action that he (she) commits. Whenever a man does or does not do something it is because he (she) willed it to be done or not to be done. But how far does his (her) responsibility go in terms of liability or praise? It is a question of being right or wrong, and of duty, in man's conscious and deliberate activity—a question on man’s responsibility on human conduct.

To answer this, there is a need to differentiate between a directly willed act from that of an indirectly willed human act. Philosophical research center stated that When the act itself is the choice of the will, it comes directly from the will and is said to be willed in itself. When the act comes indirectly from the will, inasmuch as the will chooses rather what causes the act than the act itself, it is said to be willed in its cause. Thus a man, who wills to become intoxicated, wills it directly; a man who does not wish to become intoxicated, but who seeks entertainment where, as experience tells him, he is almost sure to become intoxicated, wills the intoxication indirectly. This distinction of direct and indirect willing raises a notable issue, and we have here two of the most important principles in all ethics.(1) The difference between indirectly willed from directly willed is that when you want something to be done, you do everything in your power to achieve it, thus it is directly willed. While an indirectly willed act connotes that you wish something to be achieved but you use other alternatives to get to your goal, because these alternatives are the ones available to you.

The term human act has a predetermined technical meaning. It signifies an act carried out by man when he (she) is responsible; when he (she) understand what he (she) is doing and wills to do it. An act is considered perfectly human when it is done with full knowledge and with the full consent of the will of the person, and with full and unhampered freedom of choice, thus, free will(2).

Man is born with free will to act through his thoughts and actions but when the divine and the only omniscient God intervenes, there is no turning back, and absolutely no saying no. To ask whether a man is responsible for an act that is indirectly willed entails the need to discuss the godly forces therein, if there is such. It is written that whenever a man wants something really bad and works hard for it, the entire universe conspires to make it possible. But there comes a time when something we do not expect to happen takes place, or worse something we do not want to happen comes to pass. This is where the problem arises. Who is responsible? Is it the man’s fault? Or was it all planned by the Almighty?

Bigoted people would automatically point the blame on God, asking “why of the zillions of people in the world does it have to be me? What did I do to deserve such adversity?” The person then, tries to analyze his life, his relationships, what he did in the past, thinking that what happened was somehow his fault. He is the one responsible why he is in such deep mess that is his life. This can be rooted to the fact that the notion of where we are and what we do in life is the cause of past acts, rendering us responsible for all the things we have at present. This idea has been programmed to our consciousness since time immemorial. So to answer whether or not a man is responsible leads us to ask ourselves about our past. Thus leads us to think that whether or not an act is directly or indirectly willed, it is still our responsibility. Why? Because we are the ones involved, we thought of it in the first place, the idea of being in that situation probably brushed through our naïve minds. Unknowingly we probably did something that projected an impact on our lives, ourselves and how we react to certain situations. Perhaps we have done something unwillingly to get to where we are, because we wanted to get there.

Decision making is a task that is given to us humans exclusively. It is what sets us apart. We might be gifted with the skill of reasoning but sometimes we end up choosing the wrong things.

According to the “Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy”

“The example of the cake may be artificial, but similar situations of choice occur regularly in human life. They are the experiential rock on which the belief in ultimate responsibility is founded. The belief often takes the form of belief in specifically moral, desert-implying responsibility. But, as noted, an agent could have a sense of ultimate responsibility without possessing any conception of morality, and there is an interesting intermediate case: an agent could have an irrepressible experience of ultimate responsibility, and believe in objective moral right and wrong, while still denying the coherence of the notion of desert. “

Even though the act hasn’t been done, the fact that you thought about it makes you responsible for it because you entertained the notion may the idea will result in something that is good or something that is bad.

With the increased awareness to the practice of holding persons morally responsible has generated much of the recent work on the perception of moral responsibility. All theorists have recognized features of this practice — inner attitudes and emotions, their outward expression in censure or praise, and the imposition of corresponding sanctions or rewards. However, many people understood the inner attitudes and emotions involved to rest on a more fundamental theoretical judgment about the agent's being responsible. In other words, it was assumed that the blame and praise depends upon a certain judgment, or belief, and the agent involved have satisfied the objective conditions of becoming responsible. These assessments were recognized to be free of the inner attitudinal/emotive states involved in holding responsible in the sense that reaching such judgments and assessing them required no essential reference to the attitudes and emotions of the one making the judgment. For those people who believes in the consequentialist’ point of view, this is a judgment that the agent exercised a system of control that could be influenced through outward expressions of praise and blame in order to restrain or promote certain behaviors. For those who consider the merit view, it is a judgment that the agent has applied the mandatory form of metaphysical control,
In any way we look at the events in our lives, we play a vital role in each part because we are the ones who makes the decisions, we are the one sticking on to our beliefs, we choose our own destiny which makes ourselves responsible for whatever we may become because of the decision we have made or the path that we have chosen to follow. We lead our own lives and it is our choice how we want to live it, therefore, how we live our life and were we stand now whether or not we indirectly willed it, we are held responsible.