Responsibility for one's actions?

Question

"You drove me to suicide"

Imagine that on a suicide letter. Like saying "YOU made me kill me" "YOU drove me crazy" "YOU are frustrating me." People tend to blame others for their own actions. They don't want to take responsibility for their own tendencies. A person allows THEIRSELF to feel frustrated and allows theirself to commit suicide. It's not me, it's you!

Discuss?

Answer 1

not enough people willing to have personal accountability, its sad

Answer 2

Even you draw the lines of responsibility too narrowly.

You are right in part. Everyone has choices. Those choices can never be taken away, only weighted. If someone holds a gun to your head and says, 'Cooperate or die!', then you still have that choice - you can always die. If you make a choice that you know will likely get you killed, is it then the shooter's fault for giving you what you expect?

The bottom line is that everyone is responsible for EVERYTHING that goes on around them. Maybe you had nothing to do with why a person killed themselves... but maybe you could have stopped them, too, if you had only done so. You can blame them for the outcome, but that is no different from the note you describe. You COULD have done something, but you didn't.

If we're going to avoid denial of responsibility, you need to accept your own as well.

The suicide is responsible for ending their own life. And their consequence is that they now have no life. You are responsible for allowing the suicide to end their life. Your consequence is having to live the rest of your life with that knowledge and their absence.

Answer 3

Yes you are responsible for your actions.

However, maybe in some actions they feel that they are correct. For example: You led me to suicide because I could not stand life anymore because you won't leave or you won't stay. There are always to sides to a situation. With suicide the hardest thing for the living is when there is no note. You will never know the whys. You will feel guilt and shame for the rest of your life.

Answer 4

We Must all realize that humans have the capability to think for themselves and to make up their own minds as what direction to take their lives or to end it. Don't take the responsibly for some one Else's failures to determine their own fate. The human life span is short and we are the ones that make our lives either happy or sad by our own actions some one else may do or say something that puts us in a bad situation , we can set there and wallow in the crap or get the hell up and think for our self's and live a productive life

Answer 5

ok...so the question is self responsibility? You could also say that one must also maintain social responsibility....and of course familial responsibility. So the question becomes who is responsible for what...and that is in the perception...It is a social fiction to be responsible for the actions of others...unless by not restraining someone you are found in commission or aiding and abetting....there is a fine line between being responsible for something and being guilty of something...since I do not know you and do not know the circumstances of the thing you wished discussed I can offer up nothing that would solidify your opinion either way

Answer 6

This reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said. He said, "If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much--we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so--that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves" (Mere Christianity, p. 8).

Dale Carnegie argued essentially the same thing in the first or second chapter of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." He argued that nobody blames themselves.

Answer 7

Here is my take on it... I will use my example of emotions.

There have been times in my life when people have said to me:

"You make me so __________ ." (you can fill in the blank with what you like - angry, happy, etc.)

My response is typically something along the lines of:

I cannot possibly make you mad or happy. You are defining a situation in a way that you have learned to, decided to, or have otherwise been to conditioned to. And you are naming it "anger" or "happiness."

Your body will respond, physiologically speaking, pretty much the same to the "stress" of a wedding as it does to the "stress" of a death, for example. The outward sign may vary, but in general, what goes on inside of you is the same. It is through experience that you define what you are feeling at that moment. It is conditional, based on your perception of the situation.

Answer 8

You make a good point and sometimes people tend to do this. Why I would say it's probably easier in their minds if they point the blame on someone else.It's easier to blame others rather than say it was me I caused this problem and so forth. People shouldn't do it but it does happen alot.

Answer 9

Every single person on this planet has free will. We make choices, good and bad. Many people, however, cannot seem to get this into their heads. They even blame "God" saying that "God" is a vengeful "God".

They blame anybody and anything, except themselves. Nobody drives anybody to suicide. That person chooses to commit the act,themselves. Evan if someone has treated them badly, they still make the choice to move on and make a good life for themselves, or wallow in what has hap pend and make a choice to end it.

How can we expect to have a good life, if all our thoughts are negative. It doesn't even make sense that being miserable will make us happy. We are choosing to be miserable and until we change our thinking, we will stay miserable.

CHANGE YOUR THINKING CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Answer 10

Guilt is another form of control. That's all that is there. It isn't the lack of responsibility for their actions that is the driving force but their desire for others to feel the same imagined suffering that made them think that they needed to escape.

Answer 11

That tendency started in the garden of Eden when Adam & Eve sinned. The man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the serpent. All of us are accountable for our actions. Beside when you point the finger, the other four fingers point to you. Make it so , you'll see!