Bitcoin Forum

If you do something wrong then you are to blame. Aside from coercion, what anyone else does has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior. You can still choose to do the right thing.

People don't want responsibility. They want to do what they want, then take none of the responsibility. They want other people to pay for bad choices. And will take their money if the system allows them to. It's pretty simple but because these people are irresponsible, they keep voting for people who promise to extort as much funds as possible from other people and give to them. This is why you can't have responsibility when there is a mechanism that monopolizes and encourages the use of force (the state) to violently expropriate funds (taxation) from responsible individuals, to fund the irresponsible lifestyles of other individuals.

2/10  Would not read again.

+1000

I was responsible enough to be born in a stable middle-class American family that prepared me to be prosperous as an adult. People who chose to be born to abusive/crazy/stupid/addicted parents or in the Gaza Strip need to take responsibility for their terrible planning. They're probably the same simpletons who confuse threats of starvation or eviction with real coercion such as income taxes.

Most people would agree with this.  The problem lies in getting everyone to agree with what is "wrong" and what is "right".

Indeed. The OP is sophomoric and pointless. But now we are both subscribed and have entered the land of trolls. Prepare for the onslaught of the barbarians, but fear not. We few carry the Sword of Truth and Wisdom that thirsts for troll blood.

 :D

If you are an advocate of personal responsibility why are you using bitcoin? It relies on everyone working together and trusting eachother to do so in order to function, almost the exact opposite of personal responsibility.

Actually, it relies on people in acting in their own self-interest with the dream of future profit and value through Bitcoin. People interacting with each other is only a by product.

The opposite of personal responsibility is being ENTITLED to anothers help which is not the case here.

+1

 ;D

Not a single troll has put forth an argument of why they aren't personally responsible for their actions, aside from coercion. Typical.

Again, very simplistic view.
While I agree with the principle, life just isn't that simple.

If you're put in a situation where it's constantly very hard to do the right thing and very easy to do the wrong thing, you are still to blame for doing something wrong, but you're not solely responsible. That which put you in that situation shares the blame.

Not my fault ;)

Do you choose what family you're born into?

There is no more evidence for an independent "free will" above and beyond your flesh and blood nervous system than there is for the existence of fairies and unicorns. This does not mean that I think the concept of choice is irrelevant; even obviously deterministic systems like digital computers can be usefully described as making choices. So likewise can less-obviously-deterministic (though still made of and ruled by physical substance) human beings be said to choose. However, like any other organism, humans can be altered by forces not under their control.

One of the most obvious examples is the relationship between lead exposure and mental alteration. Exposure even to low lead levels in children correlates highly with reductions in IQ, short term memory, fine motor skills, and appropriate social interaction. It correlates with increased aggression and risk-taking. Children who are persistently exposed to lead are less able to do well in school, less able to compete in the job market once they grow up, and more likely to engage in crime and violence if they can't make it in normal society. Does this mean that we give a pass to carjackers if we find high lead levels in their bodies? No, but it does mean that trying to solve problems that need collective action by telling others "take personal responsibility" is an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to engage with reality.

Children aren't responsible for their own lead exposure. Even their parents generally aren't responsible. If you grow up in a middle class family America right now, you typically won't be exposed to much lead, due to no special action of your own or of your parents. If you grow up in low income family in America, you're more likely to be in old housing stock where exposure from lead paint dusts and chips is much more common, and to be located near an industrial facility like a smelter or battery recycling plant that emits airborne lead. If you were born in a Ghanaian or Chinese village where some residents make a living burning electronic trash to extract the metals, expect severe lead exposure along with mercury, cadmium, and a heady brew of carcinogenic combustion byproducts.

You don't even need exotic geography to be poisoned: just revisit the 19th century in the US or Great Britain. According to 1855 hearings before Parliament, adulteration of food, beverages, and medicines was endemic in Victorian Britain. For example, more than 85% of cayenne pepper examined on the market was diluted with various poisonous materials. The poisonous pigment red lead oxide was present in more than 45% of cayenne pepper, and in 30% of curry powders! Snuff was adulterated with lead oxide and lead chromate (two toxic metals for the price of one). Candy regularly contained arsenic, lead, and mercury compounds (and this was not even fraud -- there were no meddlesome laws against putting these colorful poisons in candy despite their known effects). In 1880 the Illinois Department of Agriculture published about similar problems on the other side of the Atlantic: poisonous compounds of lead, chromium, mercury, and arsenic in jellies, coffee, spices, lard, sausage, wine, cider, and tea. Turpentine in gin and sulfuric acid in beer. This in addition to dozens of less-dangerous corner cutting schemes such as dilution of butter with lard and coffee with burnt peas.

How exactly does that make you no longer responsible for your actions? Are you saying that if you're born into a poor family then you have no choice but to murder, rape and steal? What is your point?


My original post is referring to competent adults, not children or the mentally disabled. I grant that if you are a retard, you aren't necessarily in control of your actions. Everyone else still has to take personal responsibility.

Are you saying that outside influence have no impact on the choices that a person does?

You didn't read the whole thing he wrote, did you?
And what if you didn't get lower IQ, just high agression from the lead poisoning? Then what? Still fully responsible?

i don't think anything is wrong- which is an opinion.... guess i'm not to blame for anything either

No, he is saying that outside influences have no bearing on the morality of the choices, and thus little to no bearing on the type of response from society's justice systems.  Having a mental dysfunction is already a consideration in the modern concept of justice and morality, it's just not an excuse.  If you ate lead paint as a child, and then go out a do crazy things as an adult, is that cause and effect?  Clearly it is not, considering the large number of people who were also exposed to lead as children who did not grow up to be clockwork orange characters.  And the excuse about the kind of family one is born into is just as faulty, for all of the upstanding and generally successful people who came from broken, criminal and dysfunctional family influences.

No matter what kind of devil made you do it, you are still responsible for the consequences of your actions.  That is the very definition of adulthood.

I do not have to trust you at all.  I think you don't understand bitcoin.

How did we go to talking about from responsibility to influence? If your friends dare you to throw a rock through a window are you no longer responsible for your actions?


Of course, unless you have some form of mental defect that makes you compulsively act out on your aggression. I covered that already.

So all humans are created identical and there's no way that a certain thing can influence a person more than another?
While I agree in principle, it's still argumentation I would expect from a person with a very black and white view of the world. A young, and/or very naive person.

Fortunately for me, that isn't an argument that I made.  I can't even see how you came to the conclusion above by distortions of what I said, unless you just didn't bother to read them and just jumped in.  I would agree that all humans are equal under the law, but certainly not identical.  Again, it's not relevant that one person can be more influenced than another.  It's a prerequisite of an adult that s/he be able to rationally control their own deviant tendencies regardless of whether those tendencies are the result of nature or nurture.

That's what I took issue with. It can absolutely be cause and effect for one person but not for another.
Are you responsible for your own actions? Yes.
Can blame for bad actions be shared with an enabler of those actions? Absolutely.

Another may be responsible for letting you eat lead paint as a child, but then they are primarily responsible to you, not for you.  It is not, in any capacity, the liability of society and civilization at large for your heavy metal poisoning or it's associated effects.  If society wishes to take such into consideration in the collective punishment (normally called 'justice' although it tends to be far from that) imposed upon you for your actions, society can choose to do that.  However, that in no way implies that society is at fault for your condition, nor responsible in any way for your actions.  The primary goal of modern justice systems isn't either restitution of the wronged nor even punishment of the wrongdoer.  The primary goal is to limit the liberties (both in time and scope) of the wrongdoer in order to limit the further harm to society in general that the wrongdoer can commit.  If it benefits society to commit resources to 'reform' the wrongdoer so that said wrongdoer can be released and support himself, that will happen to the greatest extent that it's actually possible.  If it's not possible, and particularly if the wrongdoer is of particular risk to the public (such as a serial murderer) then reform is dropped in favor of simply indefinite incarceration.  If someone (successfully) uses the mental incapacity defense to evade a conviction, the justice system still commits them to the care and incarceration of a state mental hospital; because anyone who has a history of causing harm and lacks the capacity of self-regulation, they are even a greater threat to society at large than the career criminal.  The nutter cannot be reformed, but the mobster commits crimes due to the pursuit of profit and the belief in his own capacity of evading the police.  If he can be convinced that the profit doesn't justify the risks, the mobster can be reformed.

argumentless opinion = meritless noise

QFT

I think the argument were in the PDF which was DL;DR.

Environmental factors do give rise to mental defects. It's not just lead poisoning, though that is one of the most obvious. It's also malnutrition, fetal drug/alcohol exposure, even chronic harassment or witnessing violence. You were the first one to bring up influence in the OP, when you said "what anyone else does has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior." This can be taken two ways: as an empirical statement about reality or as a normative statement of your moral attitudes. On the first count it is false. On the second count, just like any normative statement it cannot be proven or falsified, but I disagree vigorously. Many crimes and disasters have multiple causes. We localize responsibility on one or a handful of people for criminal justice purposes because it's impractical to do otherwise, but that isn't the end of the story.

I think that you're trying too hard to atomize responsibility. There can be more than one party responsible for a problem. If an arsonist sets fire to a night club whose fire doors were chained shut to discourage cover charge avoidance, there are several parties responsible for the ensuing deaths. Ordered by (my opinion) level of culpability: the arsonist, the club operator who disabled safety features, the local enforcement agency who failed to catch the safety violation, and the cheapskate patrons who used working fire doors to dodge payment.

If we wish to minimize bad behavior rather than simply condemn it after the fact, it takes collective action: agencies to fund epidemiological research and uncover significant but non-obvious links between environmental factors and health/behavior. An EPA and FDA to ensure that people aren't unwillingly breathing, eating, and drinking chronic poisons. Social services to ensure that children are being fed and not abused. If you think that equivalent services have been and will be provided in the absence of government action, I will happily discuss examples.