What does taking responsibility entail and the value structure problem

Amongst all situations universally common to people from different historical periods, places, or social strata, here's one that may indicate the very defining mark of adulthood cross-culturally: the time when you finally decided to call the tough shots on your life; that time when you could've solicited aid, advice or supervision, and, then, retreat, but did none of that; or when you could've delegated your thinking to people or books and practical manuals but decided not to; that time when you stared the situation in the eyes and managed to keep your integrity, knowing very well you would blame no circumstance or anyone for the misfortunes that could follow.

Instead, you decided to trust your value structure; you believed for once that you were so much trustworthy that whatever you decided would bring forth the best possible outcome. You realized that your will is the efficient cause of all your actions and that you would use whatever mistakes resulting from them as valuable lessons for improving yourself.

You then learned to trust your mental processes and cautious approach to life while seeking to pursue self-knowledge. At that time, you've had already confronted your consciousness profoundly enough, emerging every time mentally stronger, less doubtful, and more self-assured of your decision-making capacities and your moral stance.

Awakening to personal responsibility

As much inspirational as reading the paragraphs above could've been, everything in them will sound alien and absurd to most of us. That used to be the case with me. But I do believe we need to take more time and space to think through what does being personally responsible entails and how to put it to practice.

Personal responsibility is the idea that people can choose, and to a certain extent cause, their actions, and, in recognizing that, accept dealing with all aspects of their execution and consequences.

Personal responsibility is not about stopping to consult people around and knowledge available to you. But in doing so, one should not point to a particular person or set of ideas as the cause of misfortune. It is not wise to embody into action any piece of knowledge or advice in an acritical manner.

It entails accepting the workload required for dealing with the consequences of speech and action initiated by you. It requires the best effort in judging and deciding every course of action, and in dealing with the consequences of failure.

It is comparatively easier to put your best effort into a high stakes situation. For instance, when you feel that flesh and bone are threatened. But no shortage of everyday situations are best addressed by embracing the idea of personal responsibility, making everything better around you.

The false centralized vs. decentralized decision-making dichotomy

It is unfortunate that in the prevailing culture many proper personally responsible behavior is condemned and reduced to overt undesirable controlling, centralizing decision-making. It seems to me that our generation places too much value on decentralized decision-making and, in doing so, erratically contrasting it with demonstrations of personal responsibility.

Decentralized decision-making is trendy. It has been linked to more agile, inclusive, robust, and reversible decisions. While all those benefits may indeed manifest, if properly implemented, this mode of action should be accompanied by diligent best effort in execution.

It may be nice to celebrate the benefits of decentralized decision-making when everything goes well; it is when the actions being undertaken by groups of people in decentralized organizations are on the verge of failure that complete lack of accountability may take place, anticipating failure at best, or causing failure at worst, in the best style of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As one of the main characteristics of decentralized organizations is to take small-scale actions and avoid too much confrontation and conflicts on the grounds of increased autonomy, the lack of negotiation between affected areas may result in resentment when things are not going well, leading to negative results more often than expected.

That is why we, as individual decision-makers, have the personal call of questioning current practices and of seeking to improve standards, thereby properly supervising and criticizing work executed under our competence area, being active participants in politics, and civilized forums of discussion. The main point is that running any organization does not dismiss the need for active accountability in the form of personal responsibility.

The hallmarks of and the search for personal responsibility

Whenever we are around a person who demonstrates a zealous mentality and contagious enthusiasm towards the banalest tasks, we may be very well witnessing personal responsibility in motion. Positive emotions and motivations towards action are the hallmarks of responsibility, as they signal voluntary surrender to any losses and drawbacks actions may incur.

When we confront life voluntarily, hoping for the best and striving to be prepared for the worst is when life starts.

It is thus an interesting exercise to do a fair amount of introspection and try to identify when was the first time that sort of responsible stance emerged. I tried to do that when writing this text and it was far from trivial. I had so much trouble with the task that I came to a stunning conclusion that I may now confess: I may very well never have truly experienced this breakthrough moment. And, I suspect, I may side with the majority of my generation.

I think it is not that I simply failed to recall or to discriminate the right episodic memory. It is more likely that such defining moment may have never happened. During my reflections, I concluded that I am a product of my surroundings and my consciousness: my workplace, my friends, my family, my culture, my knowledge, my experiences, my memories, my emotions, my beliefs and biases, my values.

Whenever I attempted to isolate my decision-making from all of such influences onto a single past instance, I failed, especially when analyzing the factors more strongly associated with consciousness.

At best, I could only point to the set of episodes where I could see my decision-making decorrelated from most environmental influences, but even so, I started to doubt whether such distancing just signaled a lack of awareness on my end or an actual total lack of influence from such factors.

I could then notice that such distancing was strongly dependent on my emotional states, such as the desire of not upsetting others, fear of judgment, blame and shame, conflict avoidance, or even positive ones such as pride, demonstration of love, and contentment.

I, therefore, concluded that such decorrelation mechanism must have adapted throughout the various stages of my life and also to the stakes of each situation I was involved in, instantiating ever more complex emotional inhibitors and triggers that regulated the perceived amount of personal responsibility I undertook at every decision.

For some, such realization may have already come after long weaved and enduring self-reflection practices. Others may benefit from some external help.

You will know you are closer to "seeing" personal responsibility reflected in your acts when what you truly value finally takes precedence in your decision-making and when you can effortlessly explain and justify your actions on the grounds of such values.

Discovering inner values through self-reflection

Let's examine a hypothesized dialogue designed to depict the inference process of inner values involved in a typical everyday life situation. Our hypothetical character is Samantha, single, with no children, in her mid 30's, leading a product team.

The dialogue illustrates the amount of effort necessary to go deeper into our inner motives and desires.

Interviewer: Why did you go to bed earlier yesterday?

Samantha: Because I wanted to perform better today and not risking a subpar presentation, it would have undermined clarity and made it less likely to persuade the attendees to start a partnership with our company.

Interviewer: And why did you care?

Samantha: Because I do value the product we are building and wanted to bring the best partners aboard.

Interviewer: Why do you value the product so much to the point of relinquishing more doses of dopamine and positive emotions in your nightly Netflix series watching habits?

Samantha: Because I strongly believe, if we do it properly and if we make it a success, that this product will benefit millions of people in achieving healthier habits and lifestyles.

Interviewer: Why do you care, personally?

Samantha: I want to make an impact. I want to feel that I am contributing somehow and being able of identifying my mark and contribution to the betterment of society.

There it is (finally) Samantha's inner motivation revealed: the need to achieve a significant personal goal (i.e., launch the product successfully) to validate her sense of belongingness to a certain group of people who are associated with doing good.

Nevertheless, goals and the accompanying motivations behind their formulations, and the striving for achieving them still differ from the concept of values.

So it is worth continuing our hypothesized exercise of self-reflection:

Interviewer: Why are you motivated by this need of knowing you belong to a group of people that made a good impact on society?

Samantha: I don't know. It may be associated with my religious upbringing, or with my early realization in childhood that the world seemed divided into bad and good people. As I saw such hypothesis reflected in virtually every fairy tale, cartoon, or movie that I watched, I guess I just took that for granted.

And here is our confession of one among the many profound cultural influences we cannot (and perhaps should not?) easily get past. But that's not satisfactory. We are not even close to breaking such description down into a value structure.

We may have found the source and the period during which such hypothetical inner values could have been forged into our character's unconscious mind, but that alone does not equate to increased self-knowledge. That Samantha was to be influenced by the mainstream aspects of our culture should come as no surprise, though we should call it progress when we can list influences and rank them by their magnitudes.

Interviewer: Okay, but why this is still relevant to you today? After all, it might have been important while you were growing under such influences, but why do you think such motive was kept by you in so high regard as to still determine your general decision-making and sense of personal responsibility?

Samantha: That's such a hard question! I guess I still believe there is good and evil. I can still identify its patterns in society whenever I see violence, anger, discrimination, unethical and unhealthy behaviors. All I want to do is helping to shine some light so we get less of that and more of its opposite.

Fair enough. We've now got Samantha's confession of her core belief in the existence of good and evil, not in any mystical format, but from a pure secularized and observational attitude.

Moreover, we've grasped her crystal clear preference to contribute to one side and we've also got a rough description of her perceptual mechanisms by which she selects her professional playfield and judges the consequences of her interventions in satisfying her goals.

Now we can start to play the devil's advocate to extract more from Samantha. As we are about to unleash a small set of uncomfortable and unsettling questions, there are no guarantees we will get what we set forth to a full and precise description of the underlying value structure behind the initial set of motivations that made her utilize her sense of personal responsibility to do a small piece of a sacrificial act, i.e. sleep earlier, that could bring forth a better outcome, i.e. increased likelihood of bringing a key partner to the project, fully aligned with her value structure, which could be hypothesized as the final cause of all of her actions.

Interviewer: Why would you see acts of violence and anger as coming from a dark, evil source? Is violence never justified?

Samantha: That's a tough one. While I can admit that there have been times in human history when violence brought change and that some changes can lead to progress, I am highly skeptical that change must necessarily be accompanied by violence. Also, anger generally leads people to offend and to stop hearing each other. And I believe that nothing good can come out of it.

Interviewer: That's interesting. So, in your view, violence can sometimes be justified but not anger? And how progress can be so highly valued to justify violence?

Samantha: Well, I see how I might be contradicting myself. It's just tough for me to draw the line, but I'd say there are oppressive forces in the world that would only cease when some dose of violence is applied. But by that I mean the kind of violence that is just enough for counterbalancing oppression, in a controlled manner, just like it is done when troops are sent to stop unlawful territorial advancement.

Samantha: When it comes to anger, I see no reason for people to use it. I mean, can anger motivate people towards action? Yes, but sustained change is negotiated.

Samantha: And regarding progress... without it, people do not have an aim to strive for. Why would we want to live in a world where things just stay the same and never improve?

The conversation is getting a bit deeper from the common-sense point of view, but still far from becoming philosophical. More verbose and more nuanced? Yes. But what can we infer from it? We see there's a fragile yet clear moral template that our character utilizes to see the world. Albeit imperfect, vaguely defined, and superficial, it is powerful enough to motivate her towards sacrificing herself to better her world.

At this point, we may want to question how genuine this account would be. Most of us have difficulties in believing that some vague description of a belief and a value structure would be the underlying cause of action.

Maybe our character is just too shy to frankly discuss her true motivations such as improving her status in her workplace? Perhaps. But then we would need to ask her why she would sacrifice to improve her status? Could the answer be to get a promotion and higher financial rewards? Yes? But for what reasons? To please people who set expectations upon her and to not disappoint them, in which case we can say she is motivated our of emotional pain avoidance? Or worse: we could suspect and convict her of undue virtue signaling, not uncommon as of these social media spotlight days.

The problem with this sort of exercise is this: there are plenty of plausible hidden motivations that could justify people's behavior. There are so many of them that we might be better off guessing.

Nevertheless, if we take our dialogue serious, we learned plenty from Samantha:

• She believes in good and evil;
• She can describe her moral template for drawing the line between good and evil;
• She wants to be and feel associated with good;
• Such desire motivated her enough to sacrifice pleasure for improved professional performance;
• She is motivated towards change;
• She believes violence can be sometimes justified when bringing about change;
• She believes in progress and can not see people wanting to live in a world lacking hope;
• She believes in dialogue and negotiated solutions to problems, despising anger for that reason.

The problem of freedom of will in personal responsibility

Now, insofar as her sacrificial choice of altering her sleep routine and abdicating from her Netflix series watching habit for one night for the sake of achieving her goals is unsurprising, there remains the problem of whether it is desirable to frame such act of personal responsibility as free will.

Is Samantha free to choose her values, desires, motivations, and goals? Are her values simply discovered through self-reflection in a later mature stage of her life? Could she invent or create novel values for herself?

The difficulties arising from serious attempts of answering such questions are formalized in works such as Arthur Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Will, presented in 1839 to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences as a response to the challenge they have posed: 'Is it possible to demonstrate human free will from self-consciousness?'

Here the discussion becomes truly philosophical. As Schopenhauer noticed, most people situate the question of free will in the step from the will to action. The problem with this approach, argued by Schopenhauer, is that it limits the philosophical investigation to the role of consciousness on freedom of action, which is a form of physical freedom. When it comes to the desires leading to the forging of the will, however, where do they come from? Could have you ever forged a single unconscious desire that is independent of external objects? To what extent you can change your will without changing your own identity?

Before going that deep, let me just point out that most people will run in serious trouble in noticing that their conscious will, for instance in the form of the opinions they hold on various topics, is strongly aligned with those of their workplaces, friend circles, families, and cultures. So we may be excused from not realizing that certain values and opinions are not truly ours.

I argue that you can't however have an opinion or a value of your own until you carefully examine its content, apply it in everyday situations, put it to test, and explicitly integrate it, voluntarily, into your conscious repertoire.

Believe me, this is exceedingly difficult to do as we age, as we struggle with less brain plasticity and lesser rates of new neural synapses formation, making the task of unlearning and relearning harder. To the elder's advantage, they may have more room for self-reflection, a practice that youngsters should regret not starting very early in life.

Habits such as journaling, blogging, and writing, in general, do help, provided they are kept honest and focused.

It may take shedding light and trespassing a myriad of complexly arranged contextual and conceptual layers dormant for years in our unconscious mind before one can feel empowered to act through the pristine lens of personal responsibility.

In closing, a few final provocative questions we may ask in our attempt to dissect freedom of will and personal responsibility are:

• What constitutes a tough decision?
• What is it that adds the drama and all suffering therein contained in the decision-makers struggle to select a single course of action over imagined alternatives?
• What is that casts indifference and inconsequential outlooks to tough decisions as hellish evil pathways of infantile chaos and self-destruction?
• What is that drives us to consistently rediscover across so many different cultures and generations the power of personal responsibility in the path towards coping with tough decisions?

No matter how we think about those questions, we need to devise an ethical system that can both help us improving our self-knowledge, but also in selecting, prioritizing, and polishing our value structure. It is my goal to contribute to that pursuit by sharing the wisdom from the calculus of conflict resolution from multi-objective studies in mathematics and decision theory.

For now, let's meditate on Benjamin Franklin's words of wisdom:

We stand at the crossroads, each minute, each hour, each day, making choices. We choose the thoughts we allow ourselves to think, the passions we allow ourselves to feel, and the actions we allow ourselves to perform. Each choice is made in the context of whatever value system we have selected to govern our lives.

In selecting that value system, we are, in a very real way, making the most important choice we will ever make.

Excerpt from "The Art of Virtue Benjamin Franklin's Formula for Successful Living."

The question I would pose to Mr. Franklin if he was alive today would be this: is it the case that we can select our value system? Or is it the various value systems that select us as blind vehicles programmed to benefit their spread and adaptation? That is a question the biologist Richard Dawkins would also be happy to ask, I suppose.