Radical responsibility 的代价：把周围的人当工具
作者: Sean Goedecke | 2026-09-04
URL: https://seangoedecke.com/radical-responsibility-means-treating-people-like-tools
Radical responsibility means treating people like tools
原文链接: https://seangoedecke.com/radical-responsibility-means-treating-people-like-tools/
A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. _Conscious Leadership_ defines it like this:
Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Conscious leadership and teams take full responsibility – radical responsibility – instead of placing blame. This means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external events.
Good leaders are outcome-focused. They are interested in actually succeeding, not in role-playing someone who’s trying to succeed1. Placing blame is an excellent strategy for that kind of role-playing: if you can identify someone else who screwed up, you can claim to be trying to succeed no matter how badly you fail. When you look at people who are genuinely focused on winning, they don’t spend time blaming when things go wrong. They’re always focused on their _outs_: the remaining pathways to success, however few and narrow.
Never placing blame sounds like a kind thing to do. However, I think there’s something a little sociopathic about “radical responsibility”. If you assert _full_ responsibility for your own circumstances, then you’re necessarily not sharing responsibility with anyone else. That forces you to take an instrumental view of the people around you. They’re not peers who you might trust and be disappointed by; they’re either useful assets to be cultivated or useless liabilities to be handled or avoided2. If you rely on someone and they let you down, that’s _your_ fault for being stupid enough to trust them in the first place. You ought to have made better tactical choices.
Many successful leaders adopt this mindset because it works. It really does help you win. But I don’t recommend it as a general approach to life. Trusting other people with responsibility is how you treat them like people, instead of like tools. And if you do that, you’ll sometimes assign praise and blame to them, instead of hoarding it all to yourself.
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1. In fact, many people role-play someone who’s trying to win as a substitute for actually trying. Here’s a relevant quote from Sartre’s _Being and Nothingness_: “The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.”
↩ 2. Or moderately-useful assets who can potentially be steered into usefulness with some feedback — but still never _blamed_, in the way that you might adjust a misbehaving power tool without blaming it. To my mind, the canonical philosophical treatment of this is Peter Strawson’s _Freedom and Resentment_, where he describes the “objective attitude”.
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How to protect yourself from workslop
“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort involved is _asymmetrical_, like a denial-of-service attack: it takes almost no effort to produce text with AI, but it still costs effort to read. Here are some ways to protect yourself.
If you have enough authority or social capital, you can and should simply tell them “hey, don’t do that” (for instance, if you’re a senior engineer and an intern starts doing this to you). This is the easiest way to handle workslop. But you probably aren’t in a position to have that conversation with all of your colleagues, and you certainly can’t have it with everyone in your management chain.
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本次摘要依据
原文 4537 字, 引用 Peter Strawson 「objective attitude」支撑「永远不接锈 = 把人当工具」的判断。