Relationshop > Brown’s Dictionary > Irresponsible

definition of irresponsible

an original definition by J. E. Brown

irresponsible

adj.

1. an irresponsible act: any act that shows an ignorance of, or disregard for, other people’s costs and expenses, e.g. time, labor, money, or well-being.
2. an irresponsible person: Someone who gains a reputation for behaving irresponsibly, i.e. for a pattern of committing irresponsible acts.
   Example: You ask a question, and someone in a web forum tells you he saw a relevant article that has a good answer to your question. But when you ask for the URL (the web address) of the article, he gives you the snotty reply “Just Google it!”, even though he has the URL in his browser history and he could just share it with you — and he knows perfectly well how many low-quality articles he had to sift through to find the information, and how many queries and minutes he wasted before finding it. He’s expressing that it’s ok with him — it’s just fine with him — if your time gets wasted.

Synonyms:

irresponsible acts: poorly thought out.
irresponsible people: thoughtless; inconsiderate.

Antonyms:

responsible, in the sense of trustworthy.

Related Concepts:

impulsivity vs. level-headedness.

moral licensing, in which people grant themselves an exception or indulgence without first getting approval from the other people who will be affected.

giving a customer the runaround: You phone a government agency and ask about a unique problem that doesn’t fit squarely into anyone’s job description or duties, causing each employee to play “Not My Job” and to forward your phone call to another department. (I’ll never forget the time I got this treatment in a complete circle: the sixth person I talked to forwarded my call back to the first person!)
{You’re reading “Definition of Irresponsible” by J. E. Brown.}

Examples:

• Passive-Aggressive Behavior: Not speaking up when you see someone doing something risky or unsafe or hazardous: allowing them to hurt themselves. (An example of failing to act on the duty to warn.)
• In general, letting people waste time and energy is unethical and irresponsible.

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irresponsibility

n.

1. Not doing one’s job.
2. Passively (by slacking, absenteeism, dereliction of duty, or sloppy work) making other people do your job or making other people complete your work.
3. Creating a mess for others to clean up.
4. Making a decision or taking an action, without thinking about how that decision or action will create work or inconvenience for others.
5. Making ten people do the work of one. Each.
   Or better still: Not doing one’s job, especially where the result is that multiple other people have to finish your work for you.
   Example: I once signed up for a music service that doesn’t regulate volume. One song might be MUCH LOUDER and one song might be much softer. The music service doesn’t care — they don’t adjust the playback volume to make all the song volumes match — they make all their customers do all the adjusting for them.
6. The belief (or behaving as if one believes) that the other person in the relationship is the one responsible for doing all the forgiving, all the friendship maintenance, all the writing and corresponding, all the inviting, all the contacting, all the staying-in-touch, all the self-censoring, and all the understanding.
   (Inspired by this new fad being taught by certain unethical psychotherapists and life coaches, who teach their clients that “It’s not YOUR responsibility to get your personality disorder under control — it’s your FRIENDS’ responsibility and your FAMILY’S responsibility to forgive, forgive, forgive.” They tell abusers: “Your job is not to be tactful — Your job is to be authentic all the time.” And “It’s not the VERBAL ABUSER’s responsibility to shut up — It’s not THEIR responsibility to stifle their verbal abuse — it’s the VICTIM’s responsibility to just not listen and not react.” You know how that goes — the victim is supposed to see into the future, second by second, and recognize that an attack is incoming, and to cover their ears BEFORE it happens. Much the way Douglas Adams’ peril-sensitive sunglasses work. Which is to say: They don’t work, because they’re fictional.)
7. The character trait of being irresponsible. In other words: Being an irresponsible person.
8. An instance of committing an irresponsible act.
   Example: “Oh good grief: I can’t believe he parked my new car on a steep hill and didn’t set the parking brake. Such irresponsibility.”
9. Creating a burden for others when you could just handle something once and for all.

   Irresponsibility is all about making other people clean up your mess. Irresponsibility is all about making other people do more work so that you can do less.

   Irresponsibility is making excuses for inaction and laziness. Irresponsibility is the difference between stopping the door from slamming — and letting it slam, over and over and over — and then making the excuse “*I* didn’t slam the door! The piston is broken.”

   Responsibility, on the other hand, is about realizing that your job description is about figuring out what your job description should be: not just doing what you were told or what you were asked to do, but figuring out new efficiencies, and new projects, and new products. Most supervisors aren’t aware of the skills you bring — otherwise, they would have added some of those skills to your job description. Responsibility is about doing what you should, not just doing what you were told.

   → My responsibility to this Dictionary means not copying other authors’ work, but realizing how much material they were missing and failing to cover, and adding that. My responsibility is to finish the work they left undone.

   Responsibility is a broad topic in law and ethics and I won’t attempt to cover all fields of discourse here. For a wider discussion, see Duty of care and Responsibility at Wikipedia.

Synonyms:

shirking one’s responsibility.

Near-Synonyms or Examples:

failing or refusing to tell people what they need to know.
recklessness.

extreme solipsism: the attitude of carelessness or disdain for others that seems to suggest “Only myself exists, or matters.”

The attitude that everything is someone else’s fault or someone else’s job. This phrase applies to persons who have been caught in wrongdoing and who then predictably try to shift blame.

negligence, especially in the sense of failure to be careful, resulting in injury or cost or inconvenience or hardship to someone else.

kicking the can down the road: It’s a shirk and a shrug, and it means “Let the next person be responsible for this.” “Let the next town downstream deal with my pollution.”

Antonyms:

responsibility: The attitude that says “You’re honorable, and I’m honorable, and therefore I’m going to think ahead about how my actions affect you. And if I break something of yours, I will mend it or replace it. I will not lead you on nor use you. I will never stand you up, never let you down, 🎵 never gonna make you cry, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you. 🎵 ” … Oops — how did that get in there? Sorry. 🙂 {You’re reading “Definition of Irresponsible” by J. E. Brown.}

owning one’s actions.
having a social conscience.
mindfulness?

Related Concepts:

laziness; slacking.
selfishness.
incompetence.
carelessness; negligence; unwatchfulness.
blame shifting.
character.

pronoun removal: a shady behavior in which people remove the word “I” from sentences in order to hide the identity of the responsible party. Example: “Mistakes were made.”

feeding frenzy in humans: a relationship disorder in which people defend bullies and abusers, and shift blame and responsibility onto victims. A kind of cowardice that tells victims to change what they wear and how they look and where they go, but is too afraid to ever tell an aggressor to change, because that would be … dangerous. So the victim is made responsible for doing all the changing.

leading someone on: one way of treating others irresponsibly by feeding them misleading information.

relativism: the belief that Wrong is only wrong if *other* people do it.

{You’re reading “Definition of Irresponsible” by J. E. Brown.}

Examples:

• Leaving a mess for someone else to clean up.
• Providing a product whose side effects cost more than the product is worth — in other words, leaving the side effects for the customer to deal with.
• Knowingly allowing damage, while taking no action to disclose or prevent it:
  • Chemical manufacturers who dump waste products (toxins and “forever chemicals” such as lead, mercury, PCBs, PFAS) into our rivers and oceans. Once these get into the water, they can’t be removed, and the next town downstream is forced to drink them.
  • Food manufacturers who add or allow harmful substances: partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs, which contribute to heart disease); silicon dioxide (which destroys tooth enamel) as a purely cosmetic “anti-caking agent”; cinnamon laced with lead and coumarin (the blood thinner). I found three of these in foods I thought were safe in my own kitchen.
  • Professional organizations who silently collude with the problem. Example: A web search in 2024 found zero web pages on the American Dental Association website (ada.org) warning the public about silicon dioxide additives in food. Zero. Because obviously dentists have a financial incentive to allow tooth damage. Shame on them.
  • Industries who mislead the public about the dangers of their products. Examples: The leaded gasoline industry lied to the public for decades by saying “Lead is natural! It must be — it’s found in the environment.” The producers of powdered quartz (aka sand, the “anti-caking agent” that turns your teeth into powder) now say the same thing about their product.
• Leaving your work unfinished in a way that causes someone else to have to do twice as much work (or more):
  • ABC News used to upload videos to YouTube with the sound turned down low, which forced 5 million viewers to turn their volume up so that the lazy inconsiderate kid who runs ABC’s social media wouldn’t have to properly adjust HIS volume — thus multiplying HIS OWN laziness by the size of the audience. This was back in the day when every ABC video spoke quietly and then ended with a jarring SHOUT FROM GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS THANKING YOU FOR WATCHING ABC NEWS!!! And five million viewers would swear and smack their volume knobs back down.
    Update: In April 2024, as I was finishing this article, I noticed the new feature in desktop YouTube called “Stable Volume”. I said “Well Hallelujah! It’s about time!” Of course, Google’s help page for this feature incorrectly says the feature is for mobile phone browsers only. 🙄 That’s Google’s documentation for ya, out of date as always. (and here’s the proof.)
  • Design your website to carelessly waste bandwidth: use full-sized images as thumbnails (icons), resulting in tiny icons that take seconds to download. Each. (Walmart in 2024; Bluesky Social in 2024)
  • Uploading your webcast or video or commercial without compressing it first, as a way of saving yourself a few minutes of processing, thus forcing all your viewers to upgrade to an expensive new Internet data plan if they want to see your content. (Amazon violates this principle as of 2024.) (A major financial firm once did this, and ironically their video claimed that the firm was “small business friendly”, even though their commercial skipped constantly because it required more bandwidth than most small businesses have! Clueless.)
• Advertising a phone number but never answering the phone.
• Giving out an email address that you never check.
• Failure to Communicate. Changing all the procedures and never telling anyone:
  My town went through a long happy phase where they took care of our medical needs: There was a yearly health fair with free flu shots and screenings. And during the first wave of Covid-19, there were well-publicized vaccination events in outdoor parking lots and school gymnasiums. But those good times quickly went to pieces:
  • In 2019, the people who run the annual Health Fair stopped updating their website. No way to get answers there….
  • In 2021, my town’s newspaper had a broken search engine that wouldn’t tell me the date of the next vaccine event. There was in fact an article about a “Flu Shot Clinic” in the paper, and my web browser history shows that I searched for “flu shots”, but the article contained the term “flu shot”, not “flu shots”, so my search came up empty. Google otoh found the article because Google is a smart search engine and can search for synonyms and plurals and singulars.
  • I only learned about the vaccine event by pure chance: One Monday night on a walk, I saw a sign on the boulevard saying “Vaccines Saturday! Hospital parking lot 9 – noon”. This caused me to wonder: “Is the event next Saturday? Or was it two days ago, and they forgot to take this sign down?” They had printed the sign without a date on it. Irresponsibly, they left out the most important part of the communication.
  • Meanwhile, my county’s webmaster didn’t think vaccines were important enough to mention on the county website. Even during a pandemic.
  • In 2022, my state’s Covid vaccine-info website stopped working: No more vaccination reminders were sent to the public; and no more giant public vaccine events were ever scheduled; only pharmacies had the doses. But mysteriously it wasn’t possible to schedule a vaccine at a pharmacy, because the vaccine-info website would simply take my request and then send me back to the start page, without giving me an event code. I sent bug reports to the state DOH and got no replies. It took me months to figure out that the website was non-functional, probably due to emergency funding running out.
  • Meanwhile, at the local pharmacy, there were only 10 openings (every day!), and those were always full from the moment the pharmacist added them to the state vaccine-info database of available vaccines. More unattainable than a Taylor Swift ticket! It took me two years to figure out I could just call the pharmacy and they’d sign me up for one of the 10 doses. But did the pharmacy ever explain that on their website or on the state website? No.
  • In 2023, the public health office got an attitude: “We’re only vaccinating the uninsured now,” they said, and sent me away.
  • In 2024, my local pharmacy stopped answering its vaccination hotline. Gee, how am I supposed to schedule my vaccines now? It took me a few days to realize I didn’t need an appointment anymore — I could just walk in. But did anyone from the pharmacy communicate that change of procedure, by (oh, I don’t know) recording those instructions in the answering machine greeting? Of course not.
    Update: In May 2024 I visited in person. One employee told me “I think vaccinations are by appointment.” I replied “I’ve been calling the vaccination number for days but no one ever answers.” She didn’t have a reply for that. Anyway, they fit me in.
    

    Welcome to Gotcha-stan, the land where nobody communicates. Instead, they make every citizen of this state figure out the procedure for themselves — and then they change it without warning. The people who should have communicated instead multiplied their own laziness and carelessness and don’t-care attitude by the millions of people affected.

• Driving drunk (just one example of a lazy shortcut that can cause injury and death to others and to oneself).
• Cutting corners for one’s own ease or convenience on such duties as:
  • the duty to warn others when they are in danger; the duty to warn visitors of hazards on the property
  • the duty to care for one’s family
  • the duty to defend one’s friends and family. (Antonym: Some people actually attack their friends and families the instant they see some stranger doing it — see feeding frenzy. Other people simply have no inhibitions to attacking friends and family — see verbal abuse and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.)
  • the duty of friendship maintenance
  • the duty of confidentiality (as opposed to Loose Lips behavior, i.e., gossiping), a duty implied by friendship and other relationships, both personal and professional (e.g., doctors, lawyers)
  • the duty to keep one’s word. This is the very basis of contract law.
  • the duty to not make promises which one cannot keep.
  • the duty to not make promises which one does not intend to keep. (Examples: See the definition of leading someone on.)
  • the duty to say no when the answer is no, instead of leading someone on.
  • the duty to say “I don’t know” when the alternative is to pretend certainty.
  • the duty to communicate when the alternative is to conceal one’s dealbreakers. Example: Failure to tell your fiancé or fiancée that you don’t agree with him or her on monogamy or having children; for more details, see the definition of dealbreaker.
  • the duty to keep one’s user guides and instruction manuals clear, complete, and up to date. (COUGH Here’s looking at you, Google.)
    • Don’t ya just hate it when a restaurant “forgets” to update the prices on its online menu, as a way of getting more customers by using the outdated prices as bait? (COUGH False advertising is shady.)
    • Don’t ya just hate it when your state or federal tax department “forgets” to push the most frequently asked questions onto their FAQ webpage, especially on issues that affect most taxpayers? (It’s called non-communication.)
    • Don’t ya just hate it when your state tax department fails to address the elephants in the room, ignoring questions like “Is this situation taxable?” and instead they just quote the rules at you without connecting the dots to your case? (COUGH Not a straight answer!)

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responsible

adj.

This word is tricky, complicated by contradictory meanings, like two opposite concepts sharing the same name:

1. character trait. Said of someone who stands willing and able to assist you if any of his advice to you or any of the products or services he provides to you end up causing you damage or injury. Synonyms: trustworthy. To the extent that you trust someone not to ignore you or shift blame or skip town in a crisis or when helping would be inconvenient, that person is said to be “responsible”.
   In his Dictionary of 1773, Samuel Johnson gave a similar definition: if you visit there, look for the word “retreat”.
2. status of guilt or culpability: In the context of discussing an event of damage or injury: Said of someone, to assign fault or blame to that person. Hence “She is the responsible party” means “In my opinion, the fault and the blame and the correction for the aforementioned mishap belong to her.”
3. statement of trust: Said of someone who is tried and true and proven reliable by a long history of good performance. Example: “Ellen is my most responsible staff member. She’ll make sure this task is done perfectly.”
   In his Dictionary of 1773, Samuel Johnson gave a similar definition: “Capable of discharging an obligation.”
4. assigned duty: Said of someone who is “on the hook” (obligated) to deliver on some specific obligation. Typically followed by the preposition “for”. Example: “John is responsible for bringing doughnuts to Saturday’s overtime session.”

Antonyms:

irresponsible

Examples:

Bad example, using both senses of the word: A vendor (e.g., an online store) who sells you defective merchandise and then refuses to answer your emails and phone calls is said to be behaving irresponsibly.
→ This is the tricky part: The vendor may accurately be called both responsible and irresponsible, in that the vendor is responsible (sense 2, meaning guilty) for the damage or injury or defective merchandise you experienced, and is behaving irresponsibly by not assisting you and by evading your attempts to contact him; that is irresponsible of him.
Note that sense 2 overrides sense 1: If someone behaves irresponsibly (in sense 2, meaning guilty), he forfeits the right to be called responsible (in sense 1 and/or sense 3, meaning trustworthy).

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responsibility

n.

This is another tricky word, having at least three different meanings, ranging from positive to neutral to negative:

1. The character trait of being responsible.
2. Blame, as in:
   1. “Accepting responsibility” means accepting blame for some accident or some wrongdoing.
   2. “Shifting responsibility” means shifting blame onto someone else or something else.
   3. “Denying responsibility” means denying blame, refusing to take the blame for something.
   
   … And so on.
3. A responsibility is a duty or obligation or assignment or commitment or contract. Example: “Feeding the chickens every morning is his responsibility.” (Compare sense 4 of responsible.)

Comparative Definitions:

Taking Responsibility vs. Stoicism:

Stoicism is a perverted system of ethics in which you’re supposedly responsible for everything that happens TO you. In other words, Stoicism teaches victim blaming. Stoicism ultimately means that people of low rank are kicked for nothing more than their low rank, whether they’ve done something wrong or not.

Stoicism is a technique for making conflict appear to disappear, using the placebo of self-blame. Example: Someone bullies or abuses you, and you go through lengthy mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the abuser or bully shouldn’t be penalized for that wrongdoing — that the responsibility to “Be a Bigger Person” is somehow on you, not on the abuser or bully. A variant of what Freud called displacement, in which the wrong person (often an underling, a safer target) is held responsible.

Correctly assigning responsibility means figuring out who is guilty and blaming that person, whereas stoicism means teaching the weaker party to unconditionally accept blame, as if goodness were based on rank.

Antonyms:

irresponsibility.

Many attempts to shift blame or escape or evade responsibility take the form of mind games.

projection (as in shifting blame onto others without evidence).

paranoia (esp. the delusion that “Other people injected evil thoughts and wishes into my head, to make me act against my will.” No they did not.)

Related Concepts:

behavioral curbs.