- Argument‹2 of 2
Responsibility gets things done by restricting people to complete their tasks and jobs in certain ways
Responsibility constrains people to follow certain rules in groups, communities, and society. Thanks to different responsibilities, society runs on the tasks done by its citizens efficiently and effectively, making people being away from laziness.
The argument
The argument is functional: responsibility is defended not as a metaphysical fact about persons but as the mechanism by which collective work actually gets done. Responsibility keeps society going, and it does so by a specific route. That route is assignment. Responsibility is allocated to everyone, so that each person has particular tasks and jobs which are theirs to take care of. The allocation does two things at once. It makes it determinate who is to act, which removes the situation in which a task is everyone's concern and therefore nobody's. And it makes the manner and timing of the work answerable to something beyond the preferences of the person doing it — a job held as a responsibility comes with expectations about when and how it is completed, not merely that it is completed eventually. The counterfactual is what the argument rests on. Without responsibility, people would finish their tasks whenever they felt like it. Inclination is an unreliable schedule: it varies between people, varies within a person from day to day, and bears no relation to when others are depending on the output. Anything requiring several people's contributions to arrive in a usable order would fail — not because anyone refused to work, but because nothing coordinated when the work happened. On this account responsibility keeps laziness at bay in the sense that matters: it substitutes an external standard for the drift towards doing things later. That is why the position holds we do possess responsibility despite our biological constraints. Whatever the correct account of how far our choices are determined by causes we did not select, the practice of assigning and holding responsibility demonstrably produces coordinated action where its absence would not. A concept doing that work is not an illusion; it is the restriction that makes shared tasks possible.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Even with responsibility, laziness exists. If something is too hard, people want to do other tasks that would be much easier to do than what they must do. If laziness still exists, there is no true concept of responsibility.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] Laziness still exists even with responsibility.