The Labyrinth of Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is a funny thing. We like to think of it as a compass, a guiding principle that keeps us on track through life. It promises agency, control, and the sense that our own choices carve out the path before us. But what happens when that compass is dropped into a labyrinth? What happens when the terrain itself is shifting beneath us?

Neoliberalism offers a peculiar kind of map for navigating this labyrinth. It whispers that the only thing standing between us and success is our own willingness to take charge. It insists that if we fail, it’s because we didn’t try hard enough. According to this logic, the world is a level playing field, and the only variable is our effort.

But there’s something disorienting about this promise. It ignores the weight some of circumstance that some us have no choice in carrying. Think of a teenager who flunks a maths test. Did they fail because they shirked responsibility and neglected to study? Or because their school was underfunded, their parents were working double shifts, and they couldn’t afford a tutor? Responsibility, in this context, becomes less a matter of individual will and more a question of circumstances. The labyrinth reveals itself as rigged.

The word responsibility comes from the Latin "responsabilis," derived from "respondere," meaning "to respond" or "to answer." Thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Donna Haraway have used the term "response-ability" to highlight the active aspect of responsibility as the capacity and obligation to respond to situations or relationships. At the same time, responsibility functions as a value judgment, assessing whether someone has responded appropriately given their powers and capacities. When we hold someone accountable, we're implicitly claiming they had the freedom to have done otherwise.

Still, we cling to the idea that the right mindset can conquer anything. Take the notion that we should "set our house in perfect order before we criticise the world." It sounds reasonable. Tidy your own affairs before trying to solve global crises. But if everyone adopted this mindset, where would collective action come from? Would the Civil Rights Movement have ever left the living room? Would suffragettes have stayed home, perfecting their domestic lives, rather than taking to the streets?

There’s a kind of sleight of hand at play here. Neoliberalism tells us that the best way to change the world is to change ourselves. It sells the idea that moral action can only come from within, making us feel that external obstacles don’t count. If you fail, it’s because you didn’t optimise your morning routine, hustle hard enough, or manifest the right energy. It turns responsibility into a moral baton, used to beat down those who don’t measure up.

But life is rarely so tidy. Responsibility isn’t just about what we do; it’s about what’s done to us. When someone loses their job because the factory shut down and moved overseas, is that their fault? Should they have "taken responsibility" by foreseeing the whims of global markets? When housing becomes unaffordable, is it because people didn’t work hard enough, or because the cost of living outpaced wages while investors turned homes into speculative assets?

This tension between individual freedom and systemic constraints is something the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre grappled with throughout his work. While he famously declared that we are "condemned to be free," Freedom, in his view, meant total responsibility for our choices. Yet Sartre recognised that this burden is not evenly distributed. In his later work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre grappled with the ways in which social and economic structures shape our freedom. He argued that while we are always free to choose, the situations in which we make those choices are not of our own making. The choices available to a wealthy executive are not the same as those faced by someone juggling two minimum-wage jobs. The labyrinth, as Sartre might say, is not just a personal challenge, it’s a collective one, shaped by history, economics, and power.

Sartre’s insight here is crucial: while we are always free to act, the material conditions of our lives — our race, class, gender, and even the country we’re born into — profoundly influence the scope of our freedom. A person born into poverty may have the same existential freedom as a billionaire, but their practical ability to exercise that freedom is constrained by systemic inequalities. Responsibility, then, cannot be understood in isolation from these conditions. To demand that individuals take full responsibility for their lives without addressing the structures that limit their possibilities is to ignore the very real ways in which the labyrinth is rigged.

If responsibility is the ability to respond to our circumstances, then those circumstances matter. The world doesn’t hand out the same toolkit to everyone. Some people are given ladders and others are given weights. Expecting them both to be able to climb out of the same pit evenly isn’t just unfair, it’s absurd.

Yet the narrative persists. In neoliberal societies, we valorise the self-made person, the entrepreneur who "hustled" their way to success, as if they did it in a vacuum. This story erases the structural forces that shape our lives. It turns systemic failures into personal ones, telling us that poverty, inequality, and injustice are just personal growth opportunities waiting to be seized.

As philosopher Emmanuel Vargas phrases it, we exist within a "social scaffolding of moral responsibility". Meaning, the values, norms, and cultural landscape that change across time and place. These external factors encourage or discourage certain behaviours and speech. Sometimes it's the scaffolding itself that needs changing, not just the individuals within it.

This isn't to say personal responsibility is irrelevant. Far from it. Owning our choices, taking charge of our lives, and striving to be better are all noble pursuits. But responsibility without context is a trap. It demands we fix ourselves while ignoring the broken systems around us.

It’s like this, imagine standing in a house that’s flooding. Neoliberalism is a guy that’s crusing past you on a jet ski and throws you mop telling you to get to work. Insisting that if you mop fast enough, you’ll stay dry and as long as you keep your house dry everything will be fine. All the while ignores the fact that the water is pouring in through the windows and covering the surronding neighbourhood as he ski’s off to the neighbours.

In the end, personal responsibility is not a solitary journey. True responsibility lies in recognising both our agency and our entanglement with others. It means understanding that while our actions matter, they don’t occur in a vacuum. It means embracing the uncomfortable truth that sometimes, the most responsible thing we can do is to demand change together. The question isn’t whether we should take responsibility but what we should take responsibility for.