16. The Weight of Responsibility

Cause, Effect and Responsibility - These are constructs which play a huge role in our moral and legal frameworks.

Let us start with cause and effect. How do you define cause and effect? We generally agree that cause precedes the effect. This makes cause and effect a product of time. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect.

If an event happens, how do you define its cause? Let’s assume that a glass window in a home in your neighbourhood was broken. You are tasked with finding its cause. You start investigating someone who says that neighbourhood kids playing ball threw it in that direction and you receive confirmation from many others. Everyone agrees that this is the cause.

From this example, how can I define cause? We know that if a ball is thrown at a glass window, it will break. If the ball wasn’t thrown, the window wouldn’t have broken.

So how about this definition - If an event E is expected to happen if the event C happened and the event E is expected not to have happened if C hadn’t happened, then C is the cause of E. Sounds grand, right? In this case, the glass window is expected to break if it is hit with the ball and the window wouldn’t have broken if it wasn’t hit by the ball.

Now imagine that this is a pretty bad neighbourhood. Your investigation reveals another interesting fact. Around the same time the ball went that way, another neighbour threw a stone on the window. But the ball hit the window first. If the ball hadn’t hit the window, the stone would have broken it anyway. This makes the second clause, “the event E is expected not to have happened if C hadn’t happened” false if C is the act of throwing the stone. The glass window would have broken anyway.

As you are stuck in a dilemma, you come across another fact that could change the whole direction of the investigation. The builder who built that house had promised that the window was bullet proof(remember that this is a bad neighbourhood), only for it to be broken by a ball. Is the builder’s negligence the cause? Going by our definition, the glass wouldn’t have broken if the builder did indeed use bullet-proof glass and the glass broke because it is not bullet-proof glass. So this could also be a cause.

My point is that there could be multiple causes to the same event. Then there is the matter of causal chains. When you investigated the kids who were responsible for the ball that hit the window, they told you that someone gave them money to do so. Does this make the person who gave the kids money the cause? One could argue so.

Does science give us an answer? Not exactly. What it does say is that because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, we could build what is called a light-cone. If you have a graph of space and time and mark a point denoting the window breaking incident, from that point, you can draw a cone that covers all the points in space from which light could have reached this point starting one second back, two second back and so on.

Any event that happened in the light-cone could be the cause. If you look at the example of the window breaking incident, you could consider that all of the ball, the stone, the corrupt builder to be the cause. You can even blame the parents of the kid who kicked the ball for not parenting the kid well enough so that the kid would know not to break other people’s windows just because someone offered money. All of them would be in the light cone. If you explore the light-cone more, you could even find more causes.

Considering how easily we determine cause and effect in our day-to-day life, why is this so hard to define? Practically speaking, this is what happens. You see an event that surprises you and you try to find its cause. If you come across an event in the past that “explains” what happened, then you take that as the cause and move on. In a way, cause is usually a knowledge gap that allows you to explain what happened. And that knowledge is usually within the light-cone according to science.

Because our knowledge is not perfect, what one considers a cause becomes highly subjective. The home owner may consider the builder as the cause because they just assumed that all the windows in the home are bullet proof and the fact that the builder lied to them is what “explains” the situation to you. Someone else who already knows that the builder lied may consider the kid’s actions to be the cause.

Now that we have established the difficulty in assigning cause for an effect, let us move on to the next difficult concept - Responsibility.

If a human being’s action is one of the causes, we tend to assign responsibility to them. As you may expect, this also has a lot of complications. Anyone who follows criminal cases closely will know the difficulties in assigning responsibility.

Take the case of the broken window again. The fact that we find it hard to assign a cause already makes it difficult to assign responsibility - Is the responsibility on the kid who threw the ball or the builder who lied? Both seem to be valid causes. Let us ignore the one who threw the stone for now.

Even if we ignore the builder, could we assign a criminal responsibility to the kid. Some may blame the parents. Some may blame the person who offered money to the kid for doing so. Some may blame poverty because the kid decided to indulge in such an act for the sake of money. And because society made him poor, they assign responsibility to the entire society.

Look at this from the kid’s perspective. He was offered money to break the window of the neighbour’s home. He had a choice to take the money or not take the money. If we are absolving responsibility from the kid because he is poor, does it mean that the kid could not have acted any differently in the circumstances? That would take away the free-will or agency on part of the kid. If we want to blame it on the person who offered money to the kid, we might actually find a back-story about that person that explains why this person did such a thing. Maybe he had a bad childhood with bad parents because of which he grew up this way.

We could go back in the causal chain forever. Where does this even stop? Should we just blame everyone in society? For this reason, there are indeed societies which are against punishment for crimes and want to help with rehabilitation. That is not a perfect solution either. But if someone commits a crime because he knows that he won’t be punished by the society, wouldn’t the society be blamed for not punishing criminals?

If we take a different approach and assign blame on the kid as the kid has free-will and agency, consider a different situation. Instead of being offered money, assume that he was made to do this with a gun on his head. What happens now? Is it fair to assign responsibility to the kid? Most of us would say no. When do we assign responsibility to the person who was the immediate cause of the event and when do we pass the responsibility to others who made this person do it? And if we go into mental health issues and crime, we have much bigger problems to grapple with.

Assigning responsibility is probably more difficult than assigning cause.