RANT: Fault vs. Responsibility

When I was in high school, my dad forbade me to use the phrase "it's not my fault." I always thought this was deeply unfair, because, really, sometimes it's not my fault -- it's the weather, or traffic, or the fridge shutting down in the middle of the night.

Eventually I figured out that when I said "it's not my fault," my dad was hearing (with justice at least some of the time) "it's not my responsibility." Sadly, these are two different, and in some ways equally useful, concepts.

In any given problem, there are two things to consider: why did it happen, and what are you going to do about it? "It's not my fault" covers the "why," at least in part; "it's not my reponsibility" is an answer to the question of handling things. Often, they have nothing to do with each other. People often cause problems they aren't responsible for fixing (e.g., I broke a tech set-up at BayCon this last weekend, which was totally my fault, but we needed someone else to fix it), and slightly less often fix problems they aren't responsible for.

I think the problem is that people often use "it's not my fault" for "I'm not going to do anything about this," and there's a loss of meaning there. People ought to own up to the things they've done, even if they can't or won't deal with the results, if for no other reason than so that other people know what's going on -- if you caused the problem, you probably know more about it than anyone else!

Taking responsibility for things you didn't cause can be very hard -- there's an assumption that if you're fixing it, you broke it -- but I think it's a mark of maturity to be able to just pick up the pieces and keep going, even if you didn't screw it up in the first place. If we only ever took responsibility for fixing things we had personally broken, then there wouldn't be any response to natural disasters, or tech screwups, or any number of other things. People who are trying to avoid blame wind up sounding like they're trying to avoid work, and some things wind up being no one's problem because they're too big to assume blame for.

I find this very frustrating.