Accountability
I wrote this post in response to a thread started by my good friend, here. I liked it enough to post it to my own. Check out the link to see the whole conversation.
"I don't think our views are incompatible. You don't have intent in an accidental situation. It's sort of the definition. If someone went into it with forethought/knowledge (the girl in your example) than it was something done with intent. The example of the four year old is an accident, in which there was no intent so doesn't speak to my point at all.
As for the result of your actions being more important than the intent... Humans are intelligent learning creatures. Part of our "survival package" is the ability to analyze results and apply them to future situations. If you learn that doing something hurts someone, and choose to do it again in the future, your intent is what causes that damage - where do you draw the line between the two? Is creating that distinction between the choice that caused the harm and the harm itself helpful somehow? They exist in symbiosis (assuming a vacuum state, excluding outside influence.) You could not have one without the other, so how are they separate?
Learning aside, most of the time when people are making harmful choices on some level they understand what they're doing. A huge part of the function of the mind and/or ego is throwing up dust so that we can continue to act in these (usually habitual) ways without having to consciously acknowledge it. There is a deeper self that knows better. The trick is learning to listen to it. On some level, no matter how slight, there is always a choice to be made. Each step taken towards light makes the next step in that direction easier; the same with darkness.
How are we helping people by not holding them accountable for their actions? Not blame mind you; accountability. Harm done to another is in some way also harm done to oneself. Should we just keep letting people damage themselves and others because they didn't mean to? Isn't the negative result from bad choices how we recognize it as a bad choice? In that case how is removing the negative result of social/societal disapproval helpful? We're pack creatures; if we only get to keep the detrimental aspects of pack behavior and not the beneficial ones it's no wonder we're such a mess."
"I don't think our views are incompatible. You don't have intent in an accidental situation. It's sort of the definition. If someone went into it with forethought/knowledge (the girl in your example) than it was something done with intent. The example of the four year old is an accident, in which there was no intent so doesn't speak to my point at all.
As for the result of your actions being more important than the intent... Humans are intelligent learning creatures. Part of our "survival package" is the ability to analyze results and apply them to future situations. If you learn that doing something hurts someone, and choose to do it again in the future, your intent is what causes that damage - where do you draw the line between the two? Is creating that distinction between the choice that caused the harm and the harm itself helpful somehow? They exist in symbiosis (assuming a vacuum state, excluding outside influence.) You could not have one without the other, so how are they separate?
Learning aside, most of the time when people are making harmful choices on some level they understand what they're doing. A huge part of the function of the mind and/or ego is throwing up dust so that we can continue to act in these (usually habitual) ways without having to consciously acknowledge it. There is a deeper self that knows better. The trick is learning to listen to it. On some level, no matter how slight, there is always a choice to be made. Each step taken towards light makes the next step in that direction easier; the same with darkness.
How are we helping people by not holding them accountable for their actions? Not blame mind you; accountability. Harm done to another is in some way also harm done to oneself. Should we just keep letting people damage themselves and others because they didn't mean to? Isn't the negative result from bad choices how we recognize it as a bad choice? In that case how is removing the negative result of social/societal disapproval helpful? We're pack creatures; if we only get to keep the detrimental aspects of pack behavior and not the beneficial ones it's no wonder we're such a mess."
posted by Artemis at 12:45 AM
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