Responsibility versus guilt

שו”ת › Category: general › Responsibility versus guilt

asked 2 years ago

I listened to your lesson in the Scholarly Thinking series in which you argued that in the case of two people driving while drunk, one killed a person and the other did not – both are equally evil, but the one who killed will go to prison because of the responsibility he has.
If the difference between them is responsibility, I would expect to see the killer pay compensation to the family (and the other of course not). Prison is a punishment and looks like a punishment for criminality. And more – a person who drove carefully but made a mistake and killed will receive a relatively light sentence, even though he killed just like the drunk and is responsible.
Additionally, it is not clear what responsibility without blame means. If Ohana is not guilty of the Carmel disaster, what does that mean that he is responsible for it? Should he have done something differently? Maybe he appointed unsuitable people? Probably not, because then he would have been guilty. And if he was not wrong, then what does his responsibility entail? Many times, following the taking of responsibility, people resign, but if he really was not wrong, why would he resign? I think responsibility really means blame, but indirectly. If you are responsible for the system, you need to appoint suitable people, make sure that everyone fulfills their role, conduct surprise reviews, etc. The argument is that if something happened, 99% of the time you had some connection to it.

Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

0 Answers

0 Vote Up Vote Down

מיכי Staff answered 2 years ago

I don’t think I ever said anything like that. Responsibility is not going to jail. I distinguished between guilt and responsibility, but I didn’t say that you are punished for responsibility. Responsibility means that the obligation to fix what you did is on you (like paying your family). Not that you are punished for it. Someone who drove drunk and did nothing is guilt without responsibility and not responsibility without guilt. Responsibility without guilt is like Ohana’s. He has indirect responsibility because what happened happened while he was minister. Maybe indirectly there is something he could have done differently, but it doesn’t amount to guilt that justifies punishment (because a fairly reasonable person would act like that. As you wrote, “some kind of touch”). And sometimes there is responsibility without guilt at all, and this is to strengthen the sense of responsibility among future office holders, and then they are held accountable for the purpose of future education even without guilt. By the way, my friend Menachem Finkelstein, who headed the committee on the escape of prisoners from Megiddo prison, told me following the submission of the report that in the State of Israel they have never imposed ministerial responsibility without guilt. Although conceptually this is possible, as I explained here.

Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

אבישי replied 2 years ago

So we seem to agree, but there is only one small disagreement left, perhaps - I argue that there is no difference at all between a drunk driver who killed and one who did not - both are equally evil and should receive the same punishment. The reason I think this is not so is in fact human weakness, whether we admit it or not, one of the significant elements of punishment is revenge on the offender. In fact, it is completely obvious, you can see in court rulings that the judges write this explicitly when they make the punishment more severe.

מיכי Staff replied 2 years ago

Indeed, I wrote and said that too. I'm just not sure it's a weakness. This revenge could be a legitimate legal goal.

אבישי replied 2 years ago

I understood from you that you were trying to explain why it is appropriate for the drunk driver who killed to be in prison and the one who didn't kill not to be. You explained it by saying that the drunk driver is responsible. I think they both should receive exactly the same punishment, unlike what is happening today.

מיכי Staff replied 2 years ago

So you misunderstood.