The Definition Of Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility or Private Responsibility is the idea that human beings choose, instigate, or otherwise crusade their ain deportment. A corollary idea is that because we cause our actions, we can exist held morally accountable or legally liable. Personal responsibility tin exist assorted to the idea that human actions are caused by conditions across the agent'southward command. Since the late 19th-century, personal responsibility has become increasingly associated with political conservatism and libertarianism. More than recently, personal responsibility has been associated with the reform of social welfare programs (eastward.1000. in the Persona 1996). The earliest known English use of the phrase is by Massachusetts Rep. Nathaniel Gorham at the U.S. Constitutional Convention on July xviii, 1787.

Quotes [edit]

The ingenuity of human being is coterminous with his cupidity. Out of the claptrap of police came the confusion-confounding device of corporate ownership. Thereby a man-made person, utterly soulless and therefore without moral identity, nevertheless serves to absorb the personal responsibleness of moral beings. That this contraption prospers under an imperialistic venture must be sheer accident; for, surely, one cannot associate the stock holding widow with the exploitation of some worker in Iran or India. Nor can the directors be individually charged with moral turpitude, since they act but in a commonage capacity and everybody knows that a collectivity is without moral responsibility. In Russia the cartel, or trust, has attained beatification by style of "common ownership," thus absolving all and sundry, especially the commissars, from witting complicity in the exploitation of Finnish miners or Polish peasants. If "everybody" is an imperialist, nobody is.
- Frank Chodorov, Fugitivmime Essays (1947). Personal responsibility is a action that many of our immature practise not understand

Social power resides in every private. Just as you lot put personal responsibleness on political behavior, so must yous assume personal responsibility for social behavior. Information technology is your job. You think poorly of legislator Chocolate-brown not because he has violated a tenet of the Tax Reform Society to which you belong, merely because he's voting for a tax levy is in your estimation an human action of robbery. It is not a peace society which passes judgment on the war maker, it is the individual pacifist. All values are personal. The good order you envision by the decline of the state is a society of which yous are an integral office; your entrada is therefore your obligation.
- Frank Chodorov, Fugitive Essays (1946).ii

Public bodies feel no personal responsibility and give full play to intrigue and cabal.
- Massachusetts Rep. Nathaniel Gorham, U.S. Constitutional Convention, July 18, 1787
Fathers shall non be put to expiry for their sons, nor shall sons exist put to death for their fathers; anybody shall be put to death for his lies.
- Moses, Deuteronomy 24:16

What does it mean to alive esthetically, and what does it mean to alive ethically? The esthetic in a person is that past which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the upstanding is that by which he becomes what he becomes.
- Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or Part II, Hong p. 178

In a spiritual sense that by which a person gives nascence is the determinative striving of the will and that is inside a person'due south power. What are you afraid of then? After all, you lot are not supposed to requite birth to another human being beingness; you are supposed to requite nascency only to yourself. And notwithstanding I am fully aware that at that place is an earnestness about this that shakes the entire soul; to go witting in 1's eternal validity is a moment that is more significant than everything else in the earth.
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part 2 Hong P. 206

There is only i matter I do non desire to fail to stress, that every bit before long equally the ethical person'southward gymnastics become an imaginary construction he has ceased to live ethically. All such imaginary amalgam is equivalent to sophistry in the realm of noesis.
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Function 2 Hong P. 253

Liberty brings men rudely and straight face to face with their responsibleness for their complimentary actions.
- Frank Meyer, In Defense of Freedom (1962)

"What a man does by another, he does by himself is a maxim."
- Roger Sherman, "Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787," Reported by James Madison. Midweek, June 13, 1787, In Committee Of The Whole.

The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man equally a personally responsible amanuensis. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer's Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to end blaming their bad choices on the gods.
- Marker Riebling, "Personal Responsibility" at the Founding," City Journal (Jump 2010). Full essay online

The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer merchandise, freer markets, private liberty, personal responsibility, and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.
- Andrew Sullivan, The Bourgeois Soul (2006)

To liberals and leftists, the bulletin would be equally blunt. In particular, your insistent, almost pathological, fear of understanding the importance of personal responsibility astonishes us. … [W]chapeau makes us 1 nation morally is an insistence on a set of values capacious plenty to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility.
- Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (1998).

There is no means by which anyone tin can evade his responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters bullheaded reliance upon "experts" and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people's domination. Equally conditions are today, nothing can exist more important to every intelligent man than economic science. His fate and that of his progeny are at stake.
- Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949)