“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
If they raped you, starved you/fed you paint chips, beat you to the point of brain injury, tortured you? How about being born in a place where the pollution is so bad that you’re likely to get sick/die from with a very high probability? Places that are completely ravaged with drought or famine? Places where genocide is fairly regular? Where your parents are so destitute that they are forced to feed you the absolute worst food (or even non-”food”) so that your brain/body never develops properly?
Of course, for people/places where rape/forced childbirth is prevalent or the knowledge of how pregnancy occurs is still non-existent, it’s understandable. For places where the former isn’t and the latter is, there really should be no statute of limitations on blame.
The quote is good, but should be understood to apply only in certain contexts (i.e., to people who weren’t born into horrific conditions and who live(d) in a place with something resemble equality of opportunity.) Not understanding this perpetuates the idea that “everything that happens to you is your own fault” that appears in some popular strains of political thought today, when it clearly cannot be universally applied.
For most of the cases you describe, the antecedent isn’t satisfied, so the local implication (old enough to take the wheel → responsible) is trivially satisfied.
This is potentially misleading. If you want to improve your life, discovering who you should really blame does not amount to accomplishing an instrumental goal.
I don’t see how this relates to the quote, unless you’re interpreting “responsibility lies with you” as meaning “you’ve only yourself to blame”. To which I would say, well, don’t do that.
“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.
Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face. -Camus
If they raped you, starved you/fed you paint chips, beat you to the point of brain injury, tortured you? How about being born in a place where the pollution is so bad that you’re likely to get sick/die from with a very high probability? Places that are completely ravaged with drought or famine? Places where genocide is fairly regular? Where your parents are so destitute that they are forced to feed you the absolute worst food (or even non-”food”) so that your brain/body never develops properly?
Of course, for people/places where rape/forced childbirth is prevalent or the knowledge of how pregnancy occurs is still non-existent, it’s understandable. For places where the former isn’t and the latter is, there really should be no statute of limitations on blame.
The quote is good, but should be understood to apply only in certain contexts (i.e., to people who weren’t born into horrific conditions and who live(d) in a place with something resemble equality of opportunity.) Not understanding this perpetuates the idea that “everything that happens to you is your own fault” that appears in some popular strains of political thought today, when it clearly cannot be universally applied.
She was talking to students at Harvard.
All advice is relative to a certain context.
The parent comment originally read, “pain chips”, which was apparently more thought-provoking than intended.
For most of the cases you describe, the antecedent isn’t satisfied, so the local implication (old enough to take the wheel → responsible) is trivially satisfied.
This is potentially misleading. If you want to improve your life, discovering who you should really blame does not amount to accomplishing an instrumental goal.
I don’t see how this relates to the quote, unless you’re interpreting “responsibility lies with you” as meaning “you’ve only yourself to blame”. To which I would say, well, don’t do that.