The Metrics of Responsibility: Expectations of Justness
January 31st, 2010
The idea of responsibility comes in different forms: feed your children, take out the trash, clean up your environment. But I think the notion deserves a new twist: certain people in certain positions need to be more responsible than others.
What got me thinking about this was Bill Gates. If I write my own operating system for my own personal use, my responsibility to society is virtually nil (imagine Sean Gullette in the classic cult film "Pi" with his one-of-a-kind mainframe). However, if I'm Bill Gates, and my operating system is named "Windows", then my operating system affects some 90% of the computer-owning populace.
Let's pretend Mr. Gates has cut corners in his product, and there is a resulting flaw that wastes 10 minutes of time per day for each user of his operating system. Let's say that a billion people worldwide are using Microsoft Windows*. In this hypothetical situation, 10 billion minutes of mankind's energy are wasted with Mr. Gates' flaw each day. That translates to over 19,000 years of man-hours, or roughly the equivalent of 237 eighty-year life-spans. Put another way, what initially appeared as a simple 10 minute flaw actually wastes the lives of 237 people each day, or over 86,000 lifetimes per year. This isn't the same as killing someone, but that's the mental comparison I want the readers to make: 237 lifetimes wasted on a flaw each day. That's equivalent to the entire population of a medium sized town wasted each year. That oversight should no longer be considered trivial.
I've just walked through one case of what I'm calling the "metrics of responsibility". This same idea can apply to almost any person or product. Politicians and public figures are interesting targets for this type of analysis. Let's say that some weirdo on the subway screams about how abortion doctors should be killed. Even on a busy day, only a handful of passengers actually hear this lunatic rambling. Compare that to Rush Limbaugh, whose malicious talk reaches millions of listeners weekly. Now, if an abortion doctor is murdered by someone inspired by these kinds of hateful pontifications, who bears the responsibility for inciting the culprit? Is it the smelly bum on the subway? Or is the loud-pundit on the airwaves? Well, the comparison isn't precise, and this should not excuse the punishment of the person who pulled the trigger, but according to the metrics of responsibility, Mr. Limbaugh bears over 99% of the responsibility for seeding this type of hate-speech because his voice is heard far and beyond his malodorous counterpart on the train. The "metrics of responsibility" help us to determine the impact that people are having on society.
The point of this article is to give a tool to weigh and rank behavior and its effects. Public officials are already viewed through this type of lens: we hold them to higher standards than the rest of us, and this discussion on the "metrics of responsibility" helps explain why. It can be useful tool.
* the figure is made up, but it's plausible if 92% of computer users are using Windows:
