With Freedom Comes Responsibility

There is a section in a chapter of my forthcoming book, 'Finding Meaning in Conflict & Beyond: The Story Of Northern Ireland', where I write about freedom and responsibility, laying the groundwork for understanding the life journeys of those people I interviewed.

Here is a brief excerpt, which still requires some editing:

"........the complexity of the freedom-responsibility challenge  we face is not to be underestimated. It has been succinctly articulated by Dr. Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher, who in a 1974 TV interview with Michael Parkinson addressed that perennial human dilemma.

In using the example of a person who is given the freedom to press the nuclear button, he extrapolates that our actions, and our choices, should have at their core, our ‘relation with a human being: when you sit and press that button, there should be a person at the end of it and the person should look like your sweetheart, and you should say to yourself, it's her, it's somebody for whom I have all those feelings’.

Such a worldview negates the notion that, in matters where we are part of a much bigger picture, our responsibility for taking the ‘right’ decision is the same as if it were just one person our actions would impact.

But that is only part of the story. Bronowsky acknowledges the moral conundrum of conflicting  allegiances that add extra layers of complexity to our decisions.  He opined, ‘One is faced at many moments in one's life between loyalties which are not compatible; one is faced with a question of loyalty to one's country as against loyalty to one's religion. Think of all the Roman Catholics who were tortured to death in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I who were constantly faced by questions of loyalty to some faith or the like’.

Our morality and values are ultimately tested in the cauldron of the awful dilemmas we face. There is no set path or proforma approach we can take, and we cannot abrogate those responsibilities to others. 

We are responsible for the choices we make; the only caveat being that if we are unable, due to lack of mental capacity, to make an informed decision, our responsibility is diminished. For example, if we have advanced dementia our understanding, reasoning, and memory are denuded to a degree that our decisions are not made freely, our level of responsibility echoes that."