Decisions and moral responsibility

Posted by yseult on Jan 30, 2007 in The Odd Philosophical Question | 0 comments

When is egoism permitted and when is it not? What is egoism in a relationship? And do we need to save ourselves before we can save someone else?

I am somehow not quite happy with Carry Tennis’ advice to Negotiating (a woman married to an alcoholic who has not accepted his problem as of yet) on Salon.com.

The major question is whether Negotiating should just leave or give her husband an ultimatum to get sober. Her problem is that she doesn’t know whether she can stay with him even if he gets sober:

Somehow, announcing that I am leaving unless he gets sober, then leaving even if he does, seems wrong. However, if I just announce that I am leaving because of his drinking, I don’t think he’ll have any motivation to quit. He is still the father of my children and still someone I care about even if I am having serious doubts about the marriage at this point.

Tennis advises:

The effect of your escape on this man is not something we can predict in advance. So do not premise your escape on any agreements with this man or any expectations about his future. He is not a person you can make agreements with. He is not a person whose future is predictable. He is, for the moment, a hopeless alcoholic. All you can do is save yourself.

It is a general rule that we cannot help anyone as long as they do not accept our help. In the case of addicts (psychos etc.) this means that, if the person in question has not accepted their problem and actually wants to change something, there is simply no way for external help to have any effect. In most cases it can be counter-productive even.

But isn’t it normal for a responsible person to reflect their own decisions and deliberate on the effects their actions might have on the people around them: their family, their friends? For all we know the fact of Negotiating leaving her husband and taking the kids with her, might be another notch in her husbands addiction. This does not imply any responsibility on her part. But its a fact that social isolation makes addiction even more hard to beat.
It’s normal for her not to know how she will feel about her marriage once he would be sober. How could she? If there are other doubts about the marriage and anger involved, they are clouded over by the most important problem: the addiction.
Why do people expect themselves to have it all figured out all the time? Leaving to reconsider and then after reconsidering would be a perfectly possible solution for Negotiating. But Tennis simply tells her to leave, be egoistic and save herself. This advice is perfectly fine for the acute problem. But is it the best way from a moral point of view?

I very much doubt that. To shed people because of their problems, their weaknesses or their ‘incompatibility’ is the easy way out. It is much harder to stick with them, love them anyway, fight with them and for them.

Analysing one’s actions and their impact on others is not simply a way to avoid a decision, it is also a way to appreciate the people around us. But everybody has their own free will to decide what to do or not to do. So even if I am concerned by somebody else’s decision, I can decide to have it affect me or not. And if my decision could affect someone else negatively, it does not imply any responsibility per se. Of course this is only valuable in ‘normal’ cases of decisions or actions, meaning: cases where the basic principle of benevolence for another person are satisfied. If I want to hurt someone, the hurtful act is surely my responsibility.
But we choose by what we are affected.It can be painful or rewarding. Being reflective about it doesn’t make us egoists, but concerned individuals.