Today’s image is an empty picture frame, in honour of C.S., who told the ex-Director off for using AI to generate previous illustrations. It is, I hope, a fitting emblem for a column about where responsibility begins: with a blank space, and someone willing to fill it themselves.
Gravity Can Have the Rest
As you know, dear reader, your ex-Director has had his fair share of scrapes and scraps over the years. And if you are human, so have you. In these moments of relative crisis I have discovered that many people’s first instinct is almost always to ask: how on earth did this happen, and who is to blame? Your ex-Director tends to apportion blame to himself, gravity and early mornings, usually in that order, whatever the particular disaster happens to be that day. But whether assessing a personal blunder, an institutional failure, or a historic calamity, the human mind often craves a neat line of cause and effect. We want to identify the initial spark, isolate the primary agent, and so allocate the blame. Your ex-Director has on several many occasions been grateful that life resists these kinds of shortcut easy solutions.
Few people understood our psychologies better than our old friend, William Shakespeare. Throughout his dramatic canon, but most acutely in his great tragedies, Shakespeare returns time and again to the problem of accountability. Consider Macbeth, perhaps his most concentrated study of downfall and ruin. At first glance, the play presents itself as a straightforward morality tale about vaulting ambition, temptation, and psychological collapse. Yet try pinning down the exact spark that sets Scotland ablaze, and the task immediately becomes fraught with ambiguity.
Do we blame the Weïrd Sisters, whose cryptic prophecies seed the very possibility of kingship in Macbeth’s mind? If they possess genuine prescience, then Macbeth is merely playing out a script already written by fate, and his agency is an illusion. But if their words are merely manipulative suggestions, do they bear the primary moral weight for awakening a dormant malice?
Or do we place the burden upon Lady Macbeth? She is the one who actively manoeuvres, cajoles, and goads her husband when his moral nerve falters. She calls upon dark spirits to unsex her, and she dismantles Macbeth’s lingering hesitations by attacking his manhood and his courage. Without her furious resolve at the critical moment, the dagger might never have been drawn. (It is worth noting that at no point does she blame the early morning, which already puts her well ahead of your ex-Director).
Then again, what of Fate itself? In the Jacobean worldview, cosmological order and predestination hovered constantly in the background. Is Macbeth simply a victim of cosmic forces far larger than any single human life, caught in a grand deterministic motion from which no mortal can step aside?
Finally, we might arrive at Macbeth himself. Was his vaulting ambition already coiled inside his character, simply waiting for a convenient external excuse to strike? When he confesses in soliloquy that he has no spur to prick the sides of his intent, only vaulting ambition, he appears to acknowledge that the primary fault lies within his own chest. Yet even his internal choice is shaped by fear, honour, peer pressure, and psychological isolation.
Shakespeare leaves the answer deliberately tangled. He understood that human responsibility rarely travels along a single, straight path. In tragedy, as in life, responsibility is not a simple vector of cause and effect. It is a dense matrix of influence, impulse, structural pressure, and personal choice. The brilliance of Macbeth lies in the fact that every character, and indeed the cosmos itself, feels simultaneously guilty and instrumental, leaving the audience unable to comfortably assign absolute blame to a single source.
This impulse to map cause directly to effect is not merely a literary device; it is a fundamental pillar of how we make sense of reality. Well over a century after Shakespeare, the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out a deeply unsettling truth about our belief in causation.
In his landmark work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume challenged the very foundation of how we assume the physical world operates. Imagine watching one billiard ball roll across a green cloth, strike a second ball, and set that second ball into motion. Common sense tells us that the impact of the first ball caused the second ball to move. We feel entirely certain that we have witnessed a direct causal relationship. (My own practical demonstrations of physical causation are usually far less elegant, generally involving a misjudged elbow, a spilling coffee cup, and an overcrowded desk).
However, Hume pointed out that we never actually observe the invisible force of causation itself. What we observe, if we analyse our sensory experience with rigorous honesty, is merely a sequence of impressions. We see Ball A move; we see Ball A touch Ball B; we see Ball B move. We witness sequence, spatial contiguity, and temporal succession. What we do not witness is the underlying necessity, the secret tie that binds the two events together.
Hume argued that our belief in cause and effect is not derived from rational proof or direct observation. Instead, it is the product of custom and habit. Because we have repeatedly seen Event A followed by Event B, our minds develop a psychological expectation that the two will always occur together. Hume called this constant conjunction. Causation, in Hume’s radical formulation, is not an observable feature of the external universe; it is a narrative structure constructed by the human mind to organise the chaotic flow of time.
If causation is a psychological habit rather than an absolute physical law, the ground beneath our moral concepts begins to feel distinctly unstable. We base our systems of ethics, law, and personal accountability on the assumption that an individual’s conscious choice causes an action, which in turn causes a specific outcome. But if the link between cause and effect is merely a customary story we tell ourselves, how secure is the foundation upon which we hold individuals responsible for what they do?
If Hume’s scepticism cast a shadow over our understanding of cause and effect, twentieth and twenty-first century physics has thoroughly rattled the furniture. As we have discussed in previous Columns, modern science has revealed that the physical universe is far stranger, far less linear, and far more paradoxical than classical philosophy anticipated.
In the realm of classical Newtonian physics, the universe operated like a magnificent, predictable clockwork mechanism. If you knew the initial position and velocity of every particle in existence, you could theoretically compute the entire past and the entire future with absolute certainty. In such a deterministic world, cause precedes effect in a strict, irreversible chain.
However, the advent of quantum mechanics disrupted this tidy picture. At the subatomic level, the universe refuses to behave like a deterministic clock. Particles exist in states of probability rather than definite locations, settling into fixed positions only upon measurement.
Even more startling are the discussions surrounding retrocausality and non-linear time. Experiments such as the delayed-choice quantum eraser have led some interpretations to suggest that choices made by an observer in the present might influence the behaviour of a particle in the past. (Many physicists dispute that reading, and your ex-Director, who cannot reliably operate the photocopier, is in no position to adjudicate). On such interpretations, the boundary between past and future becomes porous, and the forward-marching arrow of time begins to wobble a little, raising the extraordinary possibility that an effect might precede its cause, or that cause and effect are mutually constitutive rather than strictly sequential.
This quantum subversion of time finds a striking literary precedent in the labyrinthine fictions of our old friend, Jorge Luis Borges. In his celebrated 1951 essay “Kafka and His Precursors”, Borges observes how an artist retroactively creates their own predecessors. By writing his uncanny, bureaucratic nightmares, Franz Kafka altered how we read earlier writers such as Zeno, Lord Dunsany, and Robert Browning. Before Kafka, these writers had little in common; after Kafka, we recognise a shared Kafkaesque quality in their work that was not visible before. As Borges puts it: every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In Borges’s imaginative universe, just as in the delayed-choice experiments, the present does not merely inherit the past; it reaches backward into history, reordering and illuminating the causes that brought it into being.
If the temporal sequence of cause and effect can be bent, inverted, or rendered symmetric at the fundamental level of physical reality and literary history, what becomes of human agency? The traditional concept of moral responsibility relies on a forward temporal model: a person deliberates, makes a choice at Time 1, executes an action at Time 2, and produces a consequence at Time 3. If the present can reshape the past, or time does not flow in a simple linear stream, where in this fluid continuum does personal accountability actually take root?
Once you dismantle the simple formula of linear cause leading neatly to effect, accountability enters exceedingly perilous territory. We quickly find ourselves caught between two traps, both of which threaten to erase human responsibility altogether.
The first trap is the rabbit hole of infinite regress. If we accept the classical premise that every event must have a preceding cause, then every human decision is simply the effect of a prior set of circumstances. I made a specific decision today because of my current emotional state and cognitive habits. My emotional state and cognitive habits were formed by my childhood experiences and education. My childhood experiences were dictated by my parents’ choices, which were shaped by their own upbringings, economic conditions, and cultural history.
That cultural history was driven by geography, evolutionary biology, chemistry, and ultimately the specific physical conditions present at the moment of the Big Bang. (I must confess how intensely appealing I have found this philosophy during my own darker managerial moments. When an important meeting is missed or a key document goes astray, blaming the initial conditions of the Big Bang feels infinitely more comforting than admitting I simply forgot). If the chain of cause and effect extends endlessly backwards, long before my birth, then my decision today is merely the inevitable late-stage consequence of cosmic history. How can I be held meaningfully responsible for a choice whose initial conditions were set in motion billions of years before I drew my first breath? Trace responsibility backwards far enough and it evaporates into the vast, impersonal mechanics of the universe.
I see this escape attempt play out every term, and I regret to say that the chief exhibit is usually your ex-Director. When faced with a disappointing result (in modern educational parlance, an outcome falling somewhat short of target indicators), my instinct for externalising blame takes centre stage. The report was late because the printer jammed. The printer jammed because the Wi-Fi dropped out. The Wi-Fi dropped out because, on reflection, Mercury was clearly in a most unhelpful alignment. At no point in this elegant chain of grievances does there appear a man who started the report at five to five on a Thursday afternoon.
This is infinite regress operating at desk level. By attributing the result to an unbroken series of external misfortunes, I construct a comforting narrative in which I am a passive victim of circumstance rather than an active agent. Yet, as with Macbeth, the outcome rarely begins with the jammed printer. It begins weeks earlier, in the world of my own choices: the decision to procrastinate, to ignore the reading, or to entertain the comfortable illusion that preparation could wait until tomorrow.
The second trap is equally fatal to agency: the problem of pure randomness. To escape the deterministic chain of infinite regress, one might appeal to quantum indeterminacy, arguing that human choices are not strictly determined by past causes. But if a choice is not caused by prior states, character, or deliberation, it becomes an uncaused, random event. If my actions are the result of subatomic quantum fluctuations, then my choices are no more under my conscious control than the roll of a die or the decay of a radioactive atom. An uncaused event is not a free choice; it is merely an accident. Damned if deterministic, damned if random. If our actions are entirely caused by the past, responsibility is an illusion. If our actions are entirely uncaused, responsibility is equally impossible.
Where does this leave us in the practical, daily task of living? Is responsibility nothing more than a useful fiction, a convenient social convention designed to keep order in a universe that knows nothing of blame or credit?
Perhaps the mistake lies in trying to locate moral responsibility within the physical mechanics of cause and effect in the first place. Responsibility is not a substance to be measured in a laboratory, nor a simple equation linking physical events. Perhaps it belongs instead to human consciousness, self-awareness, and intention. The wonderful poet W. B. Yeats offered a subtle and enduring insight into this dilemma in the four-word epigraph to his 1914 collection Responsibilities:
In dreams begins responsibility.
Yeats, I should note, credits the line to an old play, so even he was passing the buck on authorship. It is a rather Borgesian touch: the line arrives with a hidden precursor of its own.
The line is deceptively simple, yet it offers a way out of our impasse. Moral agency does not begin at the moment a physical action is executed in the material world. Nor does it belong to the infinite chain of historical events, biological conditioning, or physical causes that preceded us. Responsibility begins in the imagination. It takes root in the private, internal space of consciousness: in our values, our desires, our ideals, and the mental models we construct of the world. Long before an action becomes an effect in the external world, it exists as a dream in the mind of the agent.
Consider Macbeth once more through this Yeatsian lens. His downfall did not begin on the blasted heath when he met the Weïrd Sisters, nor on the battlefield where he won his bloody reputation. It did not even begin when he imagined the dagger on his way to King Duncan’s bedchamber. It began in the hidden corners of his own mind, in the moment he first entertained the dream of kingship by any means and allowed it to take root. Before he took a single step toward regicide, he cultivated the internal landscape that made regicide possible. His crime was committed in his dreams long before it was executed with steel.
Alan Watts came at the same impasse from a rather different direction. Much of his writing argues that the separate, anxiously defended self we spend our lives guarding is something of a social construction, and that we are not outsiders peering in at the universe but part of what the universe is doing. If so, the question of whether I am the author of events or merely their effect begins to look like the wrong question. Responsibility stops being a verdict handed down on the past, or an anxious scramble towards the future, and becomes something closer to attention: a clear-eyed presence in the moment where choices are actually made. It is a lovely idea, and your ex-Director has, on occasion, tried it. He can report that the present moment, once found, is a good deal roomier than expected: a patch of light on the desk, the hum of the building, or, to borrow from Larkin, (admittedly not at his most cheerful), that vase.
Taking responsibility is ultimately a choice. It is less a calculation than a small act of nerve. Claiming responsibility is not about accepting all the blame or insisting that we controlled every variable; it is about choosing to step into the web rather than watch it from the side. It is the decision to say something like: whatever brought us to this moment, I will own my part in it. That choice has a practical reward, too. Whoever owns their part in a mess is the only person in the room who can do something about it next time, which is more than can be said for Mercury.
We may not be responsible for the origin of every thought that crosses our minds, but we are responsible for which ones we nourish, which values we champion, and which visions of the future we try to bring about. Responsibility is not only a debt we owe to the past; it is a commitment about what we do next. The world we build around us will always be, in some measure, a reflection of the dreams we have dared to cultivate within.
I will of course be taking full responsibility for any of my paltry words that were a burden to read. Gravity can have the rest.
Until next time, Happy reading / Being responsible!