What does this word as a core concept actually mean? What values does it represent and why is it important? I have heard it since I was a kid but never understood the core rationale behind this.
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Responsibility is a contract with society or nature to do certain actions to prevent negative outcomes and possibly have some benefits. Importabt parts here is understanding of negative outcomes and its probability.
Some examples:
People in many Africans countries have to apply chloride to water to prevent negative outcome to catch malaria and many other deseases.
Employee have to do their work properly and on time to reduce negative outcome of increased risk evaluation. When ceo see high risk evaluation they less likely want to rise employees pay rate and instead want to increase reserve, in extreeme case they will make company bankrupt if evaluations will show imminent company collaps.
Child may want to clean their room. Dirty stinky rooms reduce their social connections and increaly booling eg other childs migh swear at them something like stinky rat.
While all example above show possible negative outcome none of them actually a certain outcome.
If I had to explain it to a five year old, I suppose I’d tell them that a responsibility is something that needs to get done. And it’s usually “held” by the person that’s most well-equipped or to handle it, or in other cases it’s held by a person because it’s their unique thing to get done.
Your basic human needs? Probably your responsibility, unless you’re a child. In which case it’s probably your parent(s) responsibility.
High voltage power line failure? Probably not gonna be assigned to the average human. So we give that responsibility to someone who has been trained for years to accept it. As the size of the responsibility goes up, usually the size institution chafes with it.
I think the easiest way to explain responsiblity is to think about what happens if there no responsibilty. For example in a company people/departments have responsiblities for certain products/topics/areas. If no one is responsible for ordering toilet paper, you might have someone randomly do it but it is quite likely you run out of toilet paper at some point. So to prevent this you give someone the responsibilty to order new toilet paper, now it still is possible to run out of toilet paper (because the person didnt do a good job for example) but you can go to a person held the accountible for their acctions. This accountibilty can have diffrent ways of manifesting like a talk, being fired etc. An important thing is being held accountable doesnt mean it is a person that holds you accountable, for example you as an adult are responsible to eat a certain amount of food otherwise biology will hold you accountable with worst outcome being you dying. The concept is there is no accountablity without responsibilty, other wise in the toilet paper example you could just go to anyone in the company and fire them for not ordering toilet paper even though it wasnt their job to order toilet paper. It is important so that things dont just happen because someone feels like doing something, but because someone has to do them or there would be negative effects, like having no toilet paper. It kind of is a value in it self but you could say it overall just means we dont want bad things to happen.
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