Numinous Nonsense

Daniel Rizzuto, on his blog Evolutionary Mind, shares an interesting debate that he has been having with Zen teacher Brad Warner. The argument centers around personal responsibility and its role in public teaching and writing. From Daniel’s blog:

Brad’s argument centers on his claim that everyone is completely responsible for their own actions. This is a very enticing idea, and our system of law is based upon it to a degree, but there are exceptions. Children, for instance, are not deemed responsible for their own actions until they reach a certain age. According to the law this age is the same for everyone, but even a cursory examination of society reveals that different people develop their capacity for mental and moral reasoning at different rates. How are we to know, then, exactly when someone is capable of accepting full responsibility for their actions? Is personal responsibility simply a binary attribute that is turned off when we are born and then turned on when we become 18 years old? Alternately, does it start out at zero and then increase with the development of the individual?

I think Daniel shows a very nuanced understanding of the developmental dimension of responsibility, which in Brad’s article seems to be almost completely lacking. Of course, that it is lacking can be understood in development terms as well. Not only is there a move from being irresponsible to personally responsible (as Daniel describes above), but there is also a move from being responsible for what I do to being universally responsible. I am responsible for everything that happens in the universe, because I am that. The universal and personal and not separate, and so what I blog, what I say, what I condone, and the way I understand responsibility itself all have an important impact. Essentially, I think that is what Daniel was getting too, but that Brad may himself not be able to hear it, is itself part of the developmental issue-at-hand.