Some folks were watching Colbert talk about the student debt crisis and I asked if Colbert mentioned that it was all Joe's fault. Joe championed the 2005 bill that made discharging student debts in bankruptcy illegal, which escalated the already dire tuition problems and created the student debt crisis.
To me, there's a pretty straight lne of causality there; joe does something horrible and then a few years later there is a massive predictable disaster.
Since Joe championed the bill and worked hard to make it happen, since he holds great political power, he's personally responsible for the student debt crisis. He is answerable, as an individual, for what happened.
The folks were like "nah, it's not joe's fault, it'd been happening since blah blah blah Reagan state colleges".
I don't really understand how people assign guilt and fault and responsibilty. For me - person with power does or supports bad thing, so they are at fault and can be made to answer for what happened. But lots of people get cross with me for treating Biden the same way i'd treat someone who reduced millions of people to debt peonage or murdered hundreds of thousands of people or whatever. Like kill one person you're a monster, but at some point ordering the murder of vast numbers of people creates no moral stain?
This all came to mind, really, bc I saw a picture of Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy going on Oprah to peddle anti-vax bullshit bc she hated her son is, afaik, where anti-vax really broke in to the main-stream. And the direct result is i have acne from wearing a mask to avoid long covid. McCarthy and Winfrey, as much as any two individuals can, hold responsibility for bringing that about by bringing McCarthy's anti-science hatred of autistic people and the related anti-vax bs to a vast audience. Someone else could have done it, it might have happened without them, but Winfrey did use her massive platform to throw open the gates of hell, so she's responsible.
It's always seemed pretty clear cut to me. You do a thing, what happens next, forseeable or not, is your fault and responsibiliy. You give an order and you are morally culpable for what your minions do next, regardless of whether they did what you intended. You assume an office and you're responsible, personally, for every single thing done in the name and on the authority of that office. That's just how power works. If you wield it then you did it, then it's your fault, even if you directed someone else's hand to wield the knife.
The way I conceive of responsibility, once to take up power you're responsible for what happens next. You know, or should know, that weilding power means things may go horrifically, unpredictably wrong. And you're just as responsible when things go wrong as when they go right. There's no excuses or outs. You picked up the sword knowing that it would fall somewhere.
So, if crimes happen, you're responsible. It's essentially what you agreed to when you took up power. If you failed to control your subordinates then you failed. If you failed to account for an edge case then you failed. You can't make any excuses bc people are going to be hurt if something goes wrong. You might be absolved in court, but you still have to go to court to answer for whatever happened because you are the responsible party.
I guess in a lot of ways it's the opposite of corporate diffusion of responsibility. Instead of layers of diffusion and limited liabilty and middle management, you're responsible for everything you do and everything your minions do and can be called to answer for it.
You're elected Monday. On Tuesday, something halfway across the country that you're now in charge of goes wrong in a novel way and kills 20 people. Do you get put on trial for that? Who else does?