RESPONSIBILITY, Velangkannan D.

RESPONSIBILITY, Velangkannan D.

The word 'responsibility' is surprisingly modern.  It is also, as Paul Ricoeur has observed, 'not really well established within the philosophical tradition'. This is reflected in the fact that we can locate to rather different philosophical approaches to responsibility. The word responsibility implies response to someone or something. Responsibility apparently has to do with answering or responding [for something, to somebody]. More profoundly, it means disclosing oneself and owing up when one's action and, through it, one's own self, are called in question. Responsibility is a specifically human attitude. It is because humans are fundamentally responsible in their being that they disclose and up when called into question. The word responsibility has been applied to virtually all areas of human activity –legal responsibility, professional responsibility, political responsibility, social responsibility, and for religious moralists, even an ontological responsibility to be oneself; one is responsible for creating, projecting, and making one self. According to Aristotle,' the human is the being who makes himself /herself towards a desired end…'  Martin Heidegger argued that moral responsibility is derived from human ontological responsibility. Some theorists of developmental psychology also emphasize responsibility to and for one's self and others. Erikson Points out that a sense of responsibility develops in adulthood so that integrity of old age involves an acceptance of one's responsibility for one's own life. Rightly does John D.Rockefeller Jr say   'every night implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty'. Therefore' responsibility is the social force that binds one to the courses of action demanded by that force. It is the obligation to carry forward an assigned task to a successful conclusion. With responsibility goes authority to direct and take the necessary action to ensure success. Responsibility would mean a form of trustworthiness, the trait of being answerable to someone for something of being responsible for one's conduct. Although in common usage the meaning of  'responsibility' is thought in terms of 'accountability', 'obligation',  'trust-worthiness ', etc.It is  the ontological  responsibility  to oneself to be oneself that is the foundation and kernel of any philosophy of responsibility. 

                It is up to whether we want be responsible for the things or not, but the morality requires us to be responsible to someone, to something. In religious point of view we are supposed to have responsibility in our life because it shows what kind of minister you will be.