Havel's critique of modern attempts to explain the concept of Responsibility

"But what, in fact, is human responsibility?  And what does it relate to?  It is, after all, a relationship and thus assumes the existence of two poles: a person who is responsible, and someone, or something for whom or for which he is responsible."

"Modern man, to the extent that he is not a believer and does not understand responsibility as a relationship to God, has many more or less concrete answers to this question.  For some, responsibility is a relationship man has with other people, and with society, and they seek its roots (with varying degrees of emphasis) in education, in the social order, in subconscious calculation, or, on the contrary, in love and sacrifice, that is, in the various psychological potentialities of man.  For some, the source of responsibility is simply conscience, a part of the biological equipment of our species (something like Freud's 'superego').  For others, it is ultimately a chimera left over from the times when people still feared the gods."

"Responsibility is certainly all of these things, or rather, they are particular expressions of it, or ways in which it might be described.  But is that the end of it?  Do these answers really answer the question?"

"I'm convinced they do not.  At least I am not at all satisfied by these answers because I don't believe they touch at the heart of the matter.  They tell us as much about responsibility as the model of an atom tells us about the essence of matter, or a tachometer about the essence of motion."

"This opinion of mine, however, is more than just an opinion: it is directly rooted in my 'experience of the world,' that is, in the experience I, as an actual person, have had over the years.  All attempts to brush aside the mystery by localizing it in a particular region of the scientifically described world (ore more precisely, of the world as reconstructed by science) go directly against the grain of that experience.  Such attempts, it seems to me, are self-deceiving and lazy, nothing more than one of the 'ideological' manifestations of the crisis of human identity: man surrenders his humanity by turning it over to the offices of an expert."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The ruminations on responsibility are far less abstract here than they sound.  They are the attempts of a dissident in a communist prison to make sense of the moral imperative that has pushed him into what rationally looks like a quixotic confrontation with remorseless, naked power.  Why in heaven's name do we do it?