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1.5.10 Choosing ResponsibilityVersion 1.0 October 2022                           (Previous Version) If Love and Equality are not enough, what else is required? How can we expect people to behave responsibly if they have no free will and effectively no choice?  How do we manage free loaders and malingerers, not to say thieves and murderers, if we can't hold them morally responsible? How can we have Justice? Does Mercy mean generously ignoring the rules in special cases?  Should we defund the police, and minimize law enforcement? Can we still have safe public and private spaces? In the previous section (1.5.9) we foreshadowed that Love and Equality by themselves are inadequate as a foundation for ethical guidelines and must be supplemented by Responsibility. In the following sections we define Responsibility, and discuss the implications of our set of ethical guidelines – Love, Equality and Responsibility – and how these can and do apply in the wider society. We discuss choosing Responsibility under the following headings.
This is the current summary of our conclusions in this area: 1.5.10 We must remain aware of the dilemma of chaos or causality presented in Chapter 1 on Epistemology (section 1.1.3). The evidence says we cannot make choices of our own free will, so we should not be blamed for any supposed errors, no matter how egregious, nor should we be punished.          Most societies and religions ignored this evidence and treated people as though they have free will, so the only tools available to minimise wrongdoing are to appeal to people’s free will, berate them for their moral failures, or punish them to influence their choices. These methods are often ineffective.          Rather than make a moral judgement of a person’s worth in some absolute sense, we assess the adverse outcomes of a person’s behaviour, determine whether a realistic intervention could have been effective to prevent such adverse outcomes, and assign responsibility, in a technical sense, only where such a relevant, proximate intervention could potentially have been effective.          We use our core values to determine whether any outcomes are adverse.          In essence Justice is applying interventions when they are likely to be effective, and Mercy is not intervening, or not imposing harsh punishment, if it would be ineffective: it is NOT an act of generosity.          By treating all behaviour, including bad behaviour as causal rather than a moral failure we can apply scientific principles to improve behaviour, which is far more effective than moralistic or punitive responses, and reduces overall harm.          Some countries are changing their criminal justice systems to reflect these insights, but conservative societies retain their primitive responses.   more
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