Freedom's Virtues—Responsibility

In the first Daily Freedom in this series on “Freedom’s Virtues,” I listed the following virtues: integrity, responsibility, honesty, competence, productivity, dignity, and courage. The virtue of integrity was dealt with in that first article. Here we’ll examine why the virtue of responsibility is an individualist virtue and necessary for freedom.

The Virtue of Responsibility

Responsibility is the recognition of one’s own nature as a conscious volitional being. It is the recognition that everything one thinks or does must be consciously chosen, that no one else and nothing else can take the place of the necessity of choosing. Since every thought and action has some consequence or result, everything in an individual’s life within the scope that which one can choose, is the consequence of what he himself has chosen.

Responsibility means never evading the facts of reality, the fact that one must choose and the fact that the consequences of what one chooses to think or do are his alone and cannot be evaded without a denial of reality itself.

Virtues Interrelated

No virtue stands alone, and every virtue implies all others. The virtues are all, in some respect, mutually interdependent. No one can have the virtue of integrity and be dishonest or irresponsible for example.

The virtue of responsibility is closely related to the virtues of honesty, productivity, and dignity—to honesty because responsibility is a recognition of reality and dishonesty is an evasion of reality; to productivity because an individual is responsible for producing all he needs by his own effort and to not produce is an evasion of that responsibility; to dignity, because an individual’s value as a human being is determined by his level of productivity and one’s self-worth, or self-esteem, is his pride in fulfilling his responsibilities.

Evading Responsibility

The December 28th Daily Freedom was entitled, “The Trouble Is With You” It includes the following paragraph:

“Most of the problems and difficulties we have in life are of our own making. If you have trouble in your life, before you look for a cause for your trouble in others, in your school, your society, your government, your family, your job, your boss, look first to yourself. The trouble is not the world or others, the trouble is with you.”

This is, of course, a description of one way individuals attempt to evade responsibility. It is part of the psychological aspect of that evasion, an attempt to escape responsibility for one’s own choices and actions by blaming someone or something else for them, such as their circumstances, their environment, their heredity, or the influence of their culture and society. It is epitomized by the expression, “I couldn’t help it.”

But this self-deception cannot evade the consequences of one’s wrong choices, which are more likely to be a failure to make choices. Even when a right choice is made, a failure to finish the job, is also a choice, and some, “I couldn’t help it,” excuse will be made for it. So long as one engages in such evasions, of course, the problems caused by their wrong choices only grow worse, and frequently lead to much more immoral material forms of evading responsibility.

Those who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions often have no compunction about forcing others to bear the consequences of their wrong choices. The individual who fails to support himself because he “cannot help”choosing to drink to much, or take drugs, or be reliable enough to keep a job, does not mind accepting handouts from the state that have been extorted from those who do take responsibility for their own lives and support.

The independent individualist, of course, does not evade responsibility, yet many individualist do evade one responsibility—the responsibility to be free.

Freedom And Responsibility

While most individualists know their own success or failure, what they achieve or fail to achieve, cannot be blamed on anything or anyone else, because they are responsible for their own life and choices, and their success or failure is the consequence of their own chosen thoughts and actions. So long as that success or failure is in terms of their wealth and what they have accomplished and made of themselves, this attitude of responsibility prevails. But as soon as the most important aspect of their life is considered, their own personal freedom, it suddenly becomes a matter of circumstance, attributable to someone or something else—their society, their government, the laws, or the economy.

The premise of the Free Individual is that freedom is like every other value in human life. No one has a “right” to anything that one has not earned or achieved by their own effort. To possess anything of value in life, one must learn what is require to obtain or achieve that value and choose to make the effort to fulfill those requirements. To desire anything without earning it necessarily means it must be supplied at someone else’s expense—to posses anything unearned is theft.

Individualists understand this about everything in life except freedom, and most people believe freedom is to be supplied by someone or something else (like a government or some social system). All evade the fact that if they are not free, it is because they have not taken responsibility for their own freedom, they have not chosen to take the action necessary to make themselves free. Perhaps they do not really want to be free or believe they cannot be free. Perhaps they are more comfortable with their chains of oppression than they would be doing the difficult things winning one’s own freedom requires. Though achieving freedom might be the most difficult thing in the world to achieve, if one is not willing to except the responsibility for achieving it, they ought not to continue longing for that they have not earned and have no claim to.