wedrifid comments on A discussion of heroic responsibility - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (215)
I'm realizing that my attitude towards heroic responsibility is heavily driven by the anxiety-disorder perspective, but telling me that I am responsible for x doesn't tell me that I am allowed to delegate x to someone else, and - especially in contexts like Harry's decision (and Swimmer's decision in the OP) - doesn't tell me whether "those nominally responsible can't do x" or "those nominally responsible don't know that they should do x". Harry's idea of heroic responsibility led him to conflate these states of affairs re: McGonagall, and the point of advice is to make people do better, not to win philosophy arguments.
When I came up with the three-point plan I gave to you, I did not do so by asking, "what would be the best way to stop this bullying?" I did so by asking myself, "if McGonagall is the person best placed to stop bullying, but official school action might only drive bullying underground without stopping it, what should I do?" I asked myself this because subsidiarity includes something that heroic responsibility does not: the idea that some people are more responsible - better placed, better trained, better equipped, etc. - than others for any given problem, and that, unless the primary responsibility-holder cannot do the job, those farther away should give support instead of acting on their own.
(Actually, thinking about localism suggested a modification to my Step 1: brief the prefects on the situation in addition to briefing McGonagall. That said, I don't know if that would be a good idea in this case - again, I stopped reading twenty chapters before.)
Surprisingly, so is mine, yet we've arrived at entirely different philosophical conclusions. Perfectionistic, intelligent idealist with visceral aversions to injustice walk a fine line when it comes to managing anxiety and the potential for either burn out or helpless existential dispair. To remain sane and effectively harness my passion and energy I had to learn a few critical lessons:
'Hermione' style 'responsibility' would be a recipe for insanity if I chose to keep it. I had to abandon it at about the same age she is in the story. It is based on premises that just don't hold in this universe.
'Responsibility' of the kind you can tell others they have is almost always fundamentally different in kind to the 'responsibility' word as used in 'heroic responsibility'. It's a difference that results in frequent accidental equivocation and accidental miscommunicaiton across inferential distances. This is one rather large problem with 'heroic responsibility' as a jargon term. Those who have something to learn about the concept are unlikely to because 'responsibility' comes riddled with normative social power connotations.
That's technically true. Heroic responsibility is completely orthogonal to either of those concerns.
Expected value maximisation isn't for everyone. Without supplementing it with an awfully well developed epistemology people will sometimes be worse off than with just following whichever list of 'shoulds' they have been prescribed.
I may have addressed the bulk of what you're getting at in another comment; the short form of my reply is, "In the cases which 'heroic responsibility' is supposed to address, inaction rarely comes because an individual does not feel responsible, but because they don't know when the system may fail and don't know what to do when it might."
Short form reply: That seems false. Perhaps you have a different notion of precisely what heroic responsibility is supposed to address?
Is the long form also unclear? If so, could you elaborate on why it doesn't make sense?