The Feeling of Responsibility

My father’s farm was situated at a locality called Perry Bridge, in between the Avon and Perry rivers. At the south of the property the Perry runs into the Avon, forming a sandy point of land, and shortly thereafter the Avon runs into a large lake. The lake is named for the Duke of Wellington, but the spit at the confluence of the Perry and Avon rivers, known as Boney Point, is named for an altogether more inglorious reason. I remember my father telling me how, well into the 1960s, you could still find bones and bone fragments on this sandy point from a massacre of the local Aborigines, the Kurnai, which took place in 1840. The massacres of the Aborigines in Gippsland often occurred near water, to which the Kurnai were driven and then trapped. The massacre at Boney Point took place after a settler was killed and sheep were found with their legs broken. It is not clear how many Kurnai were killed at Boney Point, but four years afterwards, in 1844, a missionary found so many bones and skulls at this place that it could have been mistaken for a native burial ground.

Like many places in frontier societies such as Australia and the United States, Gippsland in its own small way has been, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “one of the dark places of the earth”. There were four major massacres of the Aborigines in Gippsland, and some lesser ones, typically as the conclusion of a series of skirmishes and retaliations between Aborigines and settlers. Numbers killed seem to be more in the order of dozens or hundreds, much smaller in scale to the death tolls of thousands and millions that we have become used to, but for that very reason the horror of them is harder to avoid. Not much imagination is needed to appreciate the horror of what happened at Gammon Creek in 1843 when perhaps sixty Kurnai—men, women and children—were shot and their bodies thrown into a waterhole.

The Kurnai population declined, but in Gippsland as elsewhere this occurred mainly through the impact of disease and steep falls in fertility. The dispersal of families and the destruction of traditional life took a particular toll. The demoralisation of communities and the human dysfunction that followed, typically when alcohol or substance abuse were involved, have had especially horrible consequences. The world glimpsed an extreme instance of this when the most appalling and almost unbelievable reports of widespread child sexual assault and child neglect led the federal government to assume control of Aboriginal settlements from the government of the Northern Territory in 2007.

The demoralisation of Aboriginal communities has not always taken such extreme and endemic form, but its lesser forms have plagued these communities intermittently since European settlement. I recall my father telling me, from a much earlier time, how he encountered Aboriginal men outside hotels in the township of Lake Tyers, where there was a significant Aboriginal mission station, offering their daughters in prostitution for alcohol.

So when one looks, for example, at the foundation stone of what was St Columba’s Presbyterian church in the city of Sale and reads that it was erected “to the memory of the Presbyterian pioneers of Gippsland”, it is difficult not to have mixed emotions. Assertions of collective or inherited guilt are more often the products of political ideology than good moral reasoning, and I do not subscribe to the view that the crimes committed in the course of European settlement discredit everything that has followed, or cast an immovable shadow over everything that is great about the Australian achievement.

Gippsland today is one of the most domesticated regions imaginable, but when McMillan first explored it the scrub was so thick in some places that he could only get through it on his hands and knees. The European settlers of Australia built a civilisation from the mulga while nineteenth-century Europe was incubating the “great politics” which would take modernity beyond all restraint. And without great politics or any kind of secularised eschatology Australians created a society which, measured in terms of the spread of prosperity, social mobility, educational opportunity and basic fairness, would look to people in almost every preceding age as a type of utopia. It was and is nothing of the sort, of course, but despite its injustices and imperfections the achievement and the civilisational genius behind it are not to be disavowed. 

At the same time, the disaster that befell the Aboriginal population of Australia is not to be dismissed or minimised by invoking history and treating it as an accident, like a tree falling on a passer-by. History is of course replete with episodes of occupation, colonisation and invasion, and the sufferings that follow for the defeated typically encompass some combination of atrocity, deprivation, disease and disorder. The disintegration of communities and families and the disorientation of individuals usually give rise to brutality, humiliation and destruction, whether they occur in the wake of conflict or in the conditions of peace and freedom that prevail in modern democracies.

The squalor and anarchy that blight some Aborig-inal communities today are not qualitatively different from conditions that can be found in the family-less zones of Western towns and cities, although there may be differences in degree. In all cases, it is the most vulnerable who suffer the most. But while the general sorts of things which happened to the Aborigines in Australia during European settlement have also happened to Europeans, during and after the Second World War and more recently in the Balkans, and even to Americans during and after the Civil War, the crucial difference lies in their duration and effect. The societal impact of the disasters which defeat inflicted on populations in Europe and America were enormous but proved to be temporary, and recovery from them is now complete (or well under way in the case of the Balkans). For Aborigines, however, recovery from the societal consequences of European settlement is uneven to say the least, and the suffering it engendered has lasted for generations.

Even if the locus of ultimate responsibility could be accurately identified it is not clear what practical significance it would have. The chain of responsibility can be traced back so far that it ceases to make sense. But on the other hand, we are not usually content to isolate a particular incident and the particular responsibility for it when it forms part of a larger situation. While historical events sometimes resemble forces of nature in the way that control over them eludes us, we generally do not regard the sufferings that the Aboriginal people endured in the wake of the European settlement of Australia in the same way as those caused by an earthquake or cyclone. Nor do we seriously entertain the proposition that no one today need accept responsibility for their plight. The feeling of responsibility for their situation worries us, even when responsibility is not strictly ours.

Reflecting on the massacres of the Kurnai in Gippsland, the Australian writer Patrick Morgan offers the advice that “we should tell the truth about the past, but not moralise about it, nor feel personally guilty”. I agree. There remains, however, the strange problem of feeling responsible for sufferings that we have not caused. When people speak of feeling guilty for the historic actions of their ancestors or country in which they themselves have taken no part either by act or omission, I suspect that they are attempting to articulate this feeling of responsibility and misnaming it. They are also confusing responsibility to the demands of justice with responsibility to other goods.

Responsibility to justice arises from our free and intentional actions, committed either with knowledge of their nature and likely consequences for others, or with recklessness towards them. Responsibility to justice faces backwards, as it were. It takes its orientation from what we have done and what we may owe others as a consequence. Responsibility to other goods, in contrast, faces forwards. It is oriented to seeking the good of other people, especially those who may need our help, by means that are good and which support other good things, and in particular the realisation of human flourishing. Responsibility to justice is based on individual culpability. Responsibility to other goods is based on natural sociability which directs us to other people and requires us to realise our own good by seeking theirs.

It is not surprising that the feeling of responsibility which arises from concern for the good of others should become confused with the feeling of responsibility to justice, and make itself felt as a matter of justice, because the different goods, while distinct and incommensurable, are not easily or neatly separated. Those who have suffered injustice have a right to reparation, and when the wrong-doers are no longer alive or are otherwise unable to meet the demands of reparative justice, others who have had no part in the wrong-doing may have a duty to meet these demands (if they are not prevented from doing so by other primary moral obligations). That is, the innocent may be required to assume responsibility not only in the course of attending to the good of those who have suffered historic wrongs, but also to address their right to justice.

Not surprisingly, the material resources that modernity has put at the disposal of people in the West to fulfil their most immediate primary obligations, if they are minded to do so, have naturally enough created an openness to addressing other and more remote obligations. This has to be judged a good thing, although problems also arise. There are a host of questions about the political exploitation of this openness by some activist groups and NGOs; the naivety and cynicism that can sometimes inform the responses which politicians, businessmen, academics, churches, journalists and celebrities make to it; and the instances of mismanagement, incompetence, corruption and failure that have occurred in some of the different programs generated from it. There is also the widespread confusion about what responsibility means, one token of which is what some have called “telescoped morality”, whereby individuals validate their idea of themselves as good people by investing all their moral (and moralising) energy in problems and injustices far away, while simultaneously disregarding those they create for the people nearest them by their own bad choices and habits.

But as we know acutely from the experience of the twentieth century, when suffering and injustice have so degraded a person that the humanity they share with us becomes something we have to look for rather than recognise immediately, our emotions are more likely to be repugnance and fear, at least initially, rather than sympathy and pity. It is also true that when those who suffer are difficult, unpleasant or resentful people, either because of their sufferings or their personality, we need more than emotions to persevere in seeking their good. Emotions can provide the impetus to seek the good of others, but resolution—a choice and commitment—is necessary to sustain this in action. Perhaps this is just another way of saying that love is not merely a feeling but a choice, and obviously the same can be said for responsibility.

But there is another aspect to the role that emotions can play in the feeling of responsibility and the choice to assume responsibility for others, even though we are innocent of any harm they have suffered. A not unusual emotion that we can experience before the sufferings of others is horror that such things could happen—or be done—to another human being. Horror is in fact a normal emotion to feel in response to the gross violation of another person, especially by extreme violence, cruelty or maltreatment. Another important emotion is shame. We can feel ashamed of the sufferings that other people cause, ashamed at how far another person can fall, either in degrading themselves or causing suffering and degradation to others. This is not simply a matter of being embarrassed or disconcerted. We feel shame that these are the sort of things of which human beings, including ourselves, are capable.

Shame thus points us to another form of fellow feeling, which we can resist recognising. Identifying with the sufferer is normal and estimable. But we also need to acknowledge those moments when we can see ourselves in the perpetrators of violence and the atrocity makers. Our experiences of resentment, fear, hatred and hardness of heart do not need to be extreme for us to recognise that where they have taken others in different circumstances, they can also take us. Obviously there are some—men for whom violence is a way of life, people who enjoy torture or domination, and psychopathic criminals—whose interior life is so alien to that of most normal people that no inkling of self-recognition with them is possible. But the strange way in which, for example, even normal or everyday levels of anxiety and frustration can distort our responses and make us do hateful things allows us to sense the horrors of which we too might be capable in situations of greater stress, and particularly in situations involving violence or the threat of violence.

Fear and anger—not least when it is driven by resentment—are highly labile emotions, and when they have been called forth our control over them can be very fragile indeed. Fear in particular can turn on a dime, slipping in a moment from helplessness and panic to a ferocious determination to hurt or destroy what frightens us or stands in our way. It can take us in an instant from feeling utterly powerless to imposing our will against the world and against others brutally. And all of this is to say nothing of the more mundane circumstances in which we can choose to allow our hearts to become steadily hardened over time to the good of others and to the harm caused by asserting our will against them.

We can think that we are sure of ourselves in our decency and moderation and the reassuring assumption that we would simply not be capable of certain things. But as Conrad observes, if that is all we are sure of then we are sure of nothing. Being sure of himself “is the last thing a man ought to be sure of”. Recognising this, recognising ourselves not only in those who suffer but also in those who cause suffering, is an important and neglected aspect of the feeling of responsibility.

It is interesting to consider the relationship between feeling responsible for people who are suffering because of the wrong-doing of others, and the feeling of responsibility that arises when we have caused suffering or harm to others blamelessly. A textbook example of this is the driver who, while observing the rules of the road and concentrating on his driving, is unable to stop his car in time when a child runs out in front of him. The driver did not intend to kill the child and did not contribute to her death by recklessness or negligence. Strictly speaking he has no moral responsibility for her death at all. But if he is a normal human being this is not how he feels. He will accuse himself of killing her and if asked to put a name to the form of responsibility he feels, he will most likely choose the word guilt.

As Ramsay goes on to comment, the concept of piacularity “seeks to do justice to the feelings of victim and agent, accurately describing the harm caused and explaining as rational the deep feelings stirred up, but without implying moral blame or guilty intent”. The person who becomes piacular is not to be blamed for the harm he has caused, because he is not morally responsible, but he “is to be regarded as an agent, and not as a falling tree”. Although such an agent does not deserve punishment for what he has done, some restitution might be required of him, perhaps as part of the learning from the experience, and in any case as part of acknowledging that “some morally serious thing has happened”, so that “the blameless agent who caused the harm” can be brought “fully back into the moral community”.

The person who is piacular is not culpable. He feels responsible when responsibility is not strictly his to feel, and he feels this because despite his innocence he has nevertheless violated something sacred. He needs to make expiation for what he has done, even though he has done it blamelessly. As Smith says, it is nature’s law that “the happiness of every innocent man is … not to be wantonly trod upon, without requiring some expiation, some atonement in proportion to the greatness of the undersigned violation”.

It does not make sense to apply the concepts of atonement and expiation beyond those individuals who are directly responsible, wittingly or unwittingly, for the violation of another person. For this reason, piacularity excludes the idea of collective or inherited guilt. At the same time, however, I think piacularity illuminates what ideas of collective or inherited guilt are attempting to explain. For when we are confronted with the violation of other human beings we feel compelled to assume responsibility for them. The violation of the sacred cannot leave us unmoved—even or perhaps especially when we have had no part in the violation that has been committed. We cannot atone for what others have done, nor should we seek to do so. Only the culpable—or the piacular—need to make atonement. But it is a mark of being fully human to assume responsibility for those who have been violated and to make their good our own.

In sum, I think there are four elements to why we sometimes feel responsible for those who are suffering because of the actions of others in which we have had no part. The first is our natural sociability and the concern that this elicits for the good of others. A second element is the responsibility we have to justice, particularly when the wrongdoer is incapable of making amends and those who have suffered at his hands are yet to receive reparation. The third element is fellow feeling, which encompasses not only sympathy and identification with those who are suffering, but also horror and shame at the evils which we are capable of committing against each other. Central to this is the recognition of our own personal capacity for evil, our likeness to those normal people who actually commit atrocities. The fourth element draws on the concept of piacularity, and the way the violation of something sacred compels us to share in the task of restoring right order.

The feeling of responsibility as I have tried to describe it needs to be clearly distinguished from the concept of guilt, and we need to be particularly alert to the manipulation of moral sentiments for political and ideological purposes. Deepening our understanding of what responsibility entails is a useful antidote to this, and this is one reason why I think the feeling of responsibility is so important. First and foremost, it requires us to take responsibility for ourselves.

In July the Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt was liberated from three years of captivity by rebels. Asked about the degradations she endured, she replied:

“The only thing to say about that is that we all have a duty to watch ourselves. I felt there were temptations to let yourself go towards diabolical behaviour … I think you need tremendous spirituality to stop yourself falling into the abyss.”

Bear in mind that Betancourt spoke not as a torturer or hostage taker, but as one taken hostage and tortured. We need to keep two things in mind: the evil of which we are each only too capable in both mundane and extraordinary circumstances; and the need to maintain a steady commitment to the good of others. In this we can see that the purpose of the feeling of responsibility is to save us from the abyss which is always at our feet.

Michael Casey is a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. This essay was first given as a paper at the Tenth German-American Colloquium, held in Philadelphia in July and August this year, on the theme “Responsibility: Recognition and Limits”.