Danielle asked:

Are you responsible for everything that happens to you in your life?

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To me it seems that the obvious answer is 'no'. I am not responsible for things which are beyond my
control. If a meteorite were to crash through my roof right now and smash off my big toe, I would not
be responsible for the loss of my big toe.

However, if I have a choice which directly, in a manner I have foreseen, leads to the outcome, then I
am responsible. So, if I know that pushing this glass will knock it off the table, and that it is then likely
to break, and do it anyway, then I am responsible for breaking the glass.

Complications enter in several different ways. What about when I ought to have foreseen the
outcome, but did not? To me, it seems that I am still responsible to the degree that it was an easy and
obvious possible outcome to predict, and that I was negligent in not foreseeing it. This sets up a
continuum of responsibility, from full to lesser.

Similarly, I may be an actor in a complex situation where the actions of other actor all contribute to the
outcome. Here, I can also be only partly responsible, to the extent that my own actions contributed
foreseeably to the whole situation.

I might add that it is becoming increasingly common (in our culture of victimhood) to claim that I am
not responsible for my actions because some outside event means that I did not choose freely. For
(hypothetical!) example, I am not responsible for my choice to rob you, because my parents beat me
as a child. Or (not such a hypothetical example!) a Prime Minister of Australia is not responsible for
lying to the electorate and fraudulently stealing the election because he didn't hear his public servants
telling him that his claim that refugee children were thrown into the water was inaccurate. I must say
that I find this trend deeply disturbing and dangerous to our society.

Tim Sprod