We continually make and justify decisions that have inescapable moral implications, and the question of responsibility is intrinsic to this process. Having himself fled from tyranny, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s views on this point are a good point of departure. In his last essay, he wrote: The whole of our common morality, in which we speak of obligation and duty, right and wrong, moral praise and blame — the way in which people are praised or condemned, rewarded or punished, for behaving in a way in which they were not forced to behave, when they could have behaved otherwise — this network of beliefs and practices on which all current morality seems to me to depend, presupposes the notion of responsibility, and responsibility entails the ability to choose between black and white, right and wrong, pleasure and duty; as well as, in a wider sense, between forms of life, forms of government, and the whole constellation of moral values in terms of which most people, however much they may or may not be aware of it, do in fact live.
