The Indisputable Truth About Responsibility

During a court trial, have you ever seen the judge let a criminal go because he said someone made him do it? If the judge had accepted that response given by the criminal, what a greater destructive realm this world would transform into. An individual can no more be excused for an action that they visibly performed than two plus one to equal negative zero. There is no such thing. Malcolm Gladwell stated in his article "The Power of Context" that a criminal is attentive to the events that occur in the environment and performs according to their perception of the surrounding. That said, individuals--whether they are criminals or not--are obligated to accept complete responsibility for their actions seeing that they consciously decided to act the way they did in those particular situations.

Gladwell's concepts of the Power of Context and the Broken Windows suggest that Bernhard Goetz operated the way he did on the subway train merely because of the status quo. As the Power of Context conjectures, the event in the subway train "had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz...and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles" (242-243). On the other hand, the passengers who were riding along with Goetz on the train did not comply with the graffiti on the subway walls and commit violent felonies. Not to mention, there were two women specifically who remained silent in the car, only answering to Goetz's questions with nods. Although the subway train "was filthy, its floor littered with trash and the walls and ceiling thick with graffiti" (236), the fleeing passengers and the two women who chose to stay were not inclined to physically assault the four youths despite being in a disheveled environment with high crime rates that may have encouraged such behaviors. Therefore, this actual incident that took place on December 22, 1984 challenges Gladwell's concepts of the Power of Context and Broken Windows that the only motivation to behave in a certain way comes "from a feature of the environment" (238). The account made by Gladwell that "Goetz would have shot those four kids if he had been sitting in a Burger King" (242) cannot be proven factual unless that happened in reality. It must, however, be acknowledged that the New York City subway train and Burger King radiate two completely distinctive vibes. Gladwell's statement leans toward the obvious that the environment is not the only cause to Goetz's decision to shoot the kids. Thus whether Goetz is sitting in a trash-filled subway train or eating in an unpolluted restaurant, his final resolution would be to defend himself from the suspicious boys who were "targets that existed as much in his past as in the present" (242), considering he underwent a rough past in his lifetime, even while being aware of his surroundings. Gladwell is also too general with the idea of the Power of Context. In order to show that the Power of Context and Broken Windows truly instigated Goetz's actions, these theories must be applied in a different city with parallel complications. Until then, it can be safely understood that the context of the subway train and Goetz's unhappy past were variables that led him to a homicidal outburst but he believed to be reasonable at the moment, therefore making him responsible.

Another reveal asserts that individuals are still responsible for their actions even if they are capable of overcoming the environment or not. In the Good Samaritan experiment led by John Darley and Daniel Batson, it was shown that individuals with strong mindsets were able to resist the controlling forces exerted by the current environment. People typically emphasize on the 63 percent of the group who had time to spare and stopped to help the man in the alley. They fail to recognize that the ten percent of the students in a rush helped the man in the same way, consequently skipping to the mistaken assumption that the environment alone governed the behaviors of the students. The majority of the students who hesitantly succumbed to the Power of Context

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