Personal Responsibility and the Assumption of Responsibility in Systems

Responsibility is the ability to give responses, whether to questions from those affected or from one's own conscience. To bear responsibility in this sense, it is good to have an internal moral compass that reliably indicates what is ethical and what is not. Unfortunately, this compass does not always work. Ethical blindness is a state in which someone temporarily no longer sees the ethical dimensions of his or her own behavior. This state may be facilitated by an interaction of personal and contextual factors. Within the person, there are cognitive frames (i.e., mental structures), and on the outside, three types of context can be distinguished: macro, meso, and the immediate situation. The effect of these factors is illustrated by examples, notably those that lead to or have led to unethical behavior and thus question the ability to act responsibly. Philip Zimbardo's ten-step program for responsible behavior can be seen as an attempt to reduce the risk of ethical blindness and empower people to assume responsibility.