[From Bill Powers (950207.2145 MST)]
Cleaning up mail before little jaunt to Utah tomorrow.
Martin Taylor (950207 15:30)--
Rick said something about a person who intended to run a car into a
lamp-post being responsible for the car hitting the lamp-post, but
not for the dead pedestrians, since those were unintended side
effects (or something like that). It seems to me that
responsibility in this same sense should include those side effects
that were reasonably probable or readily imagined.
I'll see your side effects and raise you: damage to the lamp-post, which
is public property, and the welfare of dependents and other relatives,
and the cost to the insurance company, and the pain and suffering of the
people who lived nearby and had to witness a horrible accident.
There seems to be a point here which is very difficult to convey. You
can talk all you please about holding other people responsible for
whatever you like. Once you have stated your view, the problem is then
to get the person to accept that responsibility and start controlling
for the things you think should be controlled for. This involves
persuasion, appeals to authority, threats of use of force, stern
lectures about right and wrong, wheedling, logic, and all the other
means people use to try to get their way. But all of this means nothing
with respect to what a person's responsibilities actually, factually,
ARE.
When you say "people are responsible for X," you are using the form of a
statement of fact. But this is just shorthand for saying "I believe or
recommend that people should assume responsibility for X" or "I propose
that we enforce the taking of responsibility for X." When you say "A
father is responsible for the welfare of his children," you are not
actually stating a fact: you are proposing a rule. Behind this proposal
is another: that if we all accept the rule, then anyone who breaks it
should be forced by whatever means are necessary to live up to it. We do
not mean that a specific father is in fact being responsible for his
children. We mean that if he fails to take this responsibility, we
should do something about it.
That takes us completely out of the purvue of basic theories of human
nature. When we begin to discuss such things, we are just human beings
with opinions about how society ought to work, and we are doing our best
to convince others that our opinions are reasonable, rational, and
right. So we are simply putting on a demonstration of how people operate
and interact at several of the higher levels. Whether, in the end, we
decide that fathers are (held by us in the majority to be) responsible
for the welfare of their children, or decide that they are not, we are
illustrating how people propose rules and arrive at a working agreement.
PCT doesn't care which way we decide. The only thing about this that is
interesting in connection with PCT is the _process_. The particular
outcome of the negotiations is of no theoretical interest.
The only clear meaning of responsibility that has any theoretical
content is the idea that people select variables to control and are the
agents responsible for controlling them. Unless we take off our
theoreticians' hats and enter the fray, there is no other meaning of
responsibility that matters.
I think it is legitimate to say that a person is just as
responsible for ...
This illustrates my point. To say it is legitimate is to announce that
there is a reasoning process behind whatever is going to be said, and
that this reasoning conveys a certain amount of authority to support
what would otherwise just be a personal opinion. This is the mode in
which we try to convince others of the rightness of our proposals,
especially when we feel that the proposal is somewhat weak without that
sort of backing. I am not criticizing this process; merely noting that
it is commonly carried out. It is probably a phenomenon at the 9th or
10th level, where reasoning and principles hold sway. Someone else could
just as "legitimately" propose that a person is _not_ responsible for
side-effects. Both parties can cite examples which make their own
position seem obviously right. But no matter what they say, only the way
they say it and the way they interact is of any theoretical interest.
The rest is simply negotiation, the system busy trying to control for
whatever matters to it..
It seems to me that the intention to get drunk has foreseeable
likely side effects, and that these side effects should be part of
the responsibility of the actor.
So run for office and see if you can get that provision made into law.
That's how we establish social responsibilities, isn't it? The
particular laws you want to make have nothing to do with PCT.
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Bruce Nevin (Tue 93027 16:41:29 EST)--
I said it is worth thinking through carefully how such perceptions
might arise, given that something about "having reliable
relationships" appears to be intrinsic.
This is akin to Dan Miller's proposal that "survival" is an intrinsic
reference level. I think we have to distinguish between the _effects_ of
controlling certain variables and the variables for which there are
actually reference levels. When we look at phenomena like the way ants
operate together, we can easily get the idea that the ants have
reference levels for amount of cooperation and division of labor. But
those concepts would obviously be beyond any ant. Whatever the actual
reference levels are that ants pursue, they have the _effect_ of
creating what we characterize verbally as cooperation etc..
I don't think people are born with any reference level for having
reliable relationships. Maybe after bumping up against other people for
a long time and gradually working out the means and ends that can
succeed in a society, a person might stop to reflect on all this and
realize that what it all adds up to is finding reliable relationships.
That realization might help organize future behavior, but then again it
may just be an intellectual observation of no practical significance.
What you refer to as a reliable relationship will emerge from control
processes that are set up to work in the environment that exists.
Control works best in an environment with constant properties, and well-
developed control processes _have_ constant properties. So people get
along best with each other when they are each competent control
hierarchies and hence are reasonably predictable. The "reliable
relationships" are simply a consequence of the natural processes by
which people learn to control in an environment of other people.
Not every regularity we can notice in behavior has a specific reference
level corresponding to it. Some do, but most probably don't. I suspect
that most regularities that we describe as verbal generalizations are
simply side-effects of more basic processes. In the interests of
parsimony, I recommend that we try to find the basic processes first,
before proposing yet another built-in reference level.
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One minor quibble, really just reiterating the same points: When
you say that "particular values, beliefs, customs, rules, and so
forth ... are all happenstance and could have come out completely
different," it is important to recognize that this is a
generalization across cultures such as you just inveighed against.
The outcome for a particular individual, growing up in a particular
community, is not happenstance and capable of coming out completely
differently.
We don't have to look at disparate cultures to see radical differences.
Just read the Letters column in the Durango Herald (all of Laplata
County has a little over 30,000 people in it). In this small a
community, one might expect (from readings about societies and cultures)
a great deal of homogeneity, but what we have includes everything from
radical right foamers-at-the-mouth to do-gooder humanists and New Age
crystal gazers.
What students of social phenomena are after is a set of generalizations
that they can claim are true of everyone in a community, group, whatever
the right word is. They are looking for what is the SAME across all the
people. This creates a very false sense of uniformity, because obvious
differences are simply lost by this approach: they show up only as
"variance" and are treated as non-phenomena or random noise.
Even in a small town like Durango, a particular individual can grow up
with a wide variety of beliefs, customs, goals, occupations, and so
forth -- we have examples of just about every variety I listed. We have
college professors who like to teach and cowboys-manque who like to get
into fights in Solid Muldoon's bar -- all born and bred in and around
Durango (leaving out the incomers). Even our little bunch of 30,000
people don't form "a" society: they form dozens of partly-overlapping
societies which share membership, like a college professor who sometimes
gets into fights at Solid Muldoon's. Or like the guy who, as a cowboy-
oriented youth, used to hunt on the hill where my house now is, went off
to school, and came back to become a professor at Ft. Lewis College.
... the materials that people adapt and renegotiate are socially
given, not invented on the spot out of whole cloth. But I don't
think you intended to claim that.
Well, yes, I think I do, on the whole. Reorganization is unpredictable;
people do not simply reflect what has happened to them or what they are
taught. SOME of the materials are socially given -- that is, the roads
were already present, and the stores, and the town hall, and so forth,
and the laws were on the books, and the social events already
established. But those are only the means of control; they don't tell
people what to want. Every person comes up with a different set of
internal perceptions and goals; all the society can do is set the stage
on which those goals are played out.
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Best,
Bill P.