Personal Responsibility

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2021

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’d probably all be able to give the government a score out of ten for its handling of the pandemic – but how many of us have even thought of subjecting ourselves to the same level of scrutiny? From illegal raves, house parties and large family weddings to the everyday decisions not to wear a mask or socially distance, how much should the public take a share of the responsibility for the spread of the virus? The author and commentator Matthew Syed claims that personal responsibility is “in retreat”. Citing a new drug to tackle obesity by hijacking the brain’s appetite-regulating system – while evidently good news – he cautions against the pernicious effects of easy fixes on human character and our sense of self. When a homeless person dies on the streets, many will view that tragedy as a “failure of the system”, and it would be unpopular to suggest the cause lies, even in small part, with the individual. Yet, individual autonomy is today’s sacred creed and it’s argued that with rights come responsibilities. Others believe there is a flaw in that logic because, as the pandemic has shown, we don’t all have the same resources or enjoy the freedom to pursue our lives as we would choose; that we are all products of our social background and no choice is made in a vacuum. What has our response to the pandemic revealed about the value we place in personal responsibility compared to other countries and cultures? Have we made too much or too little of the idea? And what does this tell us about how we should be tackling all kinds of social issues? Does an emphasis on free will, choice and responsibility help us to understand them better, or can it obscure what’s really going on? With Prof Sally Bloomfield, Dr Alexander Brown, Dr Deepti Gurdasani and Prof Sir Michael Marmot.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. For very nearly a year now, we've been living intermittently with the most severe restrictions on our liberties ever imposed, far exceeding those brought in at the outset of the two world wars.
0:11.0	An age that set such store on free will, choice, autonomy, apparently couldn't summon up the kind of personal responsibility required to curb the spread of COVID.
0:20.9	There are those who say the very idea of personal responsibility is in retreat.
0:25.7	Bad outcomes are others' fault, or the system, sins of the past, society's structural
0:31.2	inequalities. Conditions that are largely the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices are
0:36.9	medicalised, they say,
0:38.4	and made to seem out of our control. This week there was news of a new drug to tackle obesity,
0:44.3	an epidemic itself in this country, fat capital of Europe, with two-thirds of adults now
0:49.5	overweight, one-third clinically obese, a jab in the stomach appropriately enough that tricks the brain
0:55.8	into suppressing appetite. Is this a breakthrough, or an admission that we can't take personal
1:01.2	responsibility anymore and have to get willpower from a needle? Or has it always been harder for
1:07.3	some because of background or circumstance. And the whole idea of personal
1:11.6	responsibility is just a way for those who have to blame those who have not. That's our moral
1:17.2	maze tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, a social commentator at the Times, the chief executive
1:22.8	of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, the comedian Andrew Doyle, and Ash Sarkar, editor at Navarra, the left-wing media group.
1:31.0	Melanie Phillips, do you think the concept of personal responsibility is somehow on the way out?
1:37.0	I don't think it's on the way out. I think it's been etiolated by our society, which tells us we have rights rather than responsibilities.
1:43.9	I think sometimes conditions make making the right choice very difficult,
1:48.0	but all of us should have personal responsibility.
1:51.3	Otherwise, we end up infantilising each other and even regarding each other as less than human.
1:56.9	Ash Sarker.
1:58.2	I think that there's a certain irony in assembling a panel of people who are all
	...

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