Human Responsibility

A detailed Summary of Human Responsibility

Man has always struggled with the issue of human responsibility, even the great

philosopher Aristotle admitted that there were cases in which he felt it was too difficult to

either find a person responsible or not responsible for their actions. Therefore, we need a

structured set of characteristics to describe responsibility. There are three basic defining

characteristics of moral responsibility that I use as a model to decide whether or not a

person should be held accountable for their actions. The first characteristic is, whether or

not the person causally contributed to the event happening, either passively or actively. I

believe that contributing to an event happening passively could include a person acting

out of negligence, for instance, if a person could've immediately brought a halt to an

event happening or continuing and didn't and also fits the other two characteristics of

responsibility they should then be held accountable for the outcome of the ordeal. The

second criterion that a person must fit to be held responsible is whether he or she knew or

should have known that the event would happen. Free will is the final trait that an

totally out of his or her own free will. I personally believe that in more cases than not

people should be held responsible for their immediate actions whether it has good or bad

d accountable in my opinion, free will meaning that the

For the oral presentations we performed in class my group presented the tragic bombing of Hiroshima, which occurred on August sixth 1945. We found many people responsible for the deaths of the thousands of innocent Japanese including President Truman, the Secretary of State Byrnes, the Secretary of War Stimpson, and the Emperor of Japan Hirochito, among others. One of the people that I believe shouldn't be held responsible was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Roosevelt did contribute to development of the atomic bomb by starting and overlooking the Manhattan project and he did so of his own free will so he satisfied two of the three characteristics of responsibility. I do not believe we should hold him accountable for the deaths of these people though because of the fact that he didn't have knowledge that the event would definitely happen or the exact capabilities of this new weapon. Also, there is no definite way we can say that if President Roosevelt were to have been alive at the time that the decision to drop the bomb was made that he would have made the same choice as President Truman.

responsibility are basically self explanatory and simple, but the third, free will, is where

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Approximate Word count = 1407
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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