Sunday, June 13, 2004

Useless Blame

If some concept of ethics can be realized, it will often follow that there are people who divert from its laws. It may also be that without the need for ethics it is clear that there is malice of some form, or else negligence, or perhaps simple misfourtane. The natural reaction is to have these people take responsibility and assume penitence.

Responsibility, so long as it may be reasoned with the world without creating it, is harmless. It is in those cases when responsibility becomes the defining property of action that there is a problem. If this were not so, it must be that blame itself is important, that those who have come to wrong are deserved blame as an essential ideal, when suffering is mandated for its own sake.

Evil can exist itself, as a diversion from ethics, without the essential quality of suffering, and penitence is useless if it has no goal of correction. Responsibility is good as a quality of a person, not a a forced action.