Personal Responsibility

Personal Responsibility

Robert Hartwick

GEN/200

February 19, 2011

Renita Hobbs

Personal Responsibility

When we think about personal responsibility we tend to only think about what this means in our personal life. The foundations of our personal responsibilities are a mixture of our upbringing and personal experiences throughout our lives. We often seem to take our personal responsibilities for granted as though they are written in stone and cannot be changed. In fact they are changing all the time. Looking at some research done on this subject combined with some personal views we will attempt to define what personal responsibility means to us, the role it plays in health, wealth, and a successful education and a plan to practice these personal responsibilities.

Defining Personal Responsibility

To define what our personal responsibilities are we need to take a step back and examine what we consider to be personal responsibility. We all have a good idea about what our basic personal responsibilities are such as work, home and family responsibilities. The definition of personal responsibilities however can be much more complicated than this. As stated by Bottery “It should be noted initially that there are a variety of different ethical and political theories by which a concept of 'duty' might be arrived at, and how it should therefore be practiced” (Bottery, 1999, para. ). So as we can see there can be many different factors that define personal responsibility. In my opinion the starting point for defining personal responsibility is the way we were raised by our parents. This sets our base of personal responsibilities such as being responsible for our actions, honesty, and treating others with respect. This is taught early in life and remains with us throughout our lives and evolves to include school and later in life the work. So our personal responsibilities are defined as performing one’s duties to one’s self and the duties of being a good citizen. As we...