Who Carries Your Error?

Why Do We Ask Someone Else to Bear the Consequences of Our Judgment?

Amar Murray

In 1784 Immanuel Kant wrote a short essay answering a question posed in a Berlin newspaper: What is enlightenment? He began with one of the most famous definitions in modern philosophy: enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from an immaturity it has brought upon itself, an inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another. He then offered an example that deserves more attention than it usually receives: “If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself.”

Look at Kant’s list. It contains no tyrant, jailer or authority imposing itself by force. It contains a book, a pastor and a physician. Three people who provide a service, are deliberately consulted and are sometimes paid. The dependence Kant describes is not imposed from above. It is purchased. That is the detail on which this essay turns.

My earlier essays examined exemption from the side of the person who grants or imposes it: who draws the circle of protection, and how respect descends into immunity from criticism. The other side remains, and in my view it is more urgent: exemption as a request rising from below rather than an authority descending from above. Why do people ask someone else to judge on their behalf?

Kant’s answer, and where I differ

Kant answers directly: “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind remains under lifelong tutelage, even after nature has long since emancipated them from external guidance.” His answer is clear and courageous in its context. It treats dependence as a moral defect in the individual: laziness prevents effort, cowardice prevents the burden of independence.

I differ from him at one point, and that point is the whole subject of this essay.

To judge between competing, sincere values is not necessarily laziness. It is genuinely costly. It requires weighing each case separately, accepting that one’s judgment is provisional, revising it when circumstances change, and living without final comfort. The person who weighs values remains at work; the person who hands over the judgment rests. To call that rest laziness is like calling someone who hires a lawyer lazy for not studying the law himself.

What is transferred to the guardian is not simply the effort of thinking. Many people who surrender their judgments spend far more effort defending them than examining them. What they transfer is the liability for error. Someone who reasons for himself and gets it wrong still owns the mistake and remains answerable for it. Someone who follows has a ready answer for every error: that is what I was told. The difference is not the amount of effort, but where responsibility rests. Not every reliance is tutelage and not every consultation transfers responsibility. The question is whether the judgment remains open to review and the consequences remain with the person who acts.

Under tutelage, a person does not merely purchase better information. He also purchases exemption from the burden of judgment. A guardian may offer genuine knowledge, but when the relationship becomes tutelage, the most dangerous service is insurance against responsibility, including responsibility for errors that have not yet occurred.

From defect to burden

Erich Fromm approached this question from a direction closer to the one I am describing. In Escape from Freedom, he argues that modern freedom liberated the individual from traditional bonds that had supported him, leaving him alone before choices he could not bear. He therefore tends to escape into submission to an authority that will carry the burden for him. Fromm’s strength is that he moves the explanation from defect to burden. Dependence is no longer simply laziness; it is flight from a genuine weight.

I would take one further step and differ from Fromm about the source of that weight. For him, it is produced by a historical and psychological situation: the isolation and anxiety of the modern individual. I argue that it is deeper and older. It belongs to the structure of values themselves, because people do not face one value that they either obey or violate. They face sincere values that conflict and require a judgment that never comes with certainty. This condition does not disappear through reform of modern society. Dependence is therefore not merely a psychological illness to be cured. It is a reasonable exchange from within the logic of the person who makes it, which is precisely why moral exhortation cannot cure it.

This is not only a disease of tradition

One might think that this description applies only to societies governed by religion or tradition. A third witness comes from a very different setting.

In the second volume of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville imagines the despotism democratic nations should fear. He describes it not as overt coercion but as care: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object were to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their wants, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns. What remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Tocqueville’s crucial insight is that this authority is not imposed. It is gentle, useful and comfortable. People accept it because it serves them. It reproduces what Kant described, but without a book, pastor or physician, within a society that considers itself free from tutelage. Dependence is therefore not a property of one tradition. It is a relationship that can be formed wherever responsibility is heavy and relief is offered.

A choice, not ignorance

There is also a witness within my own tradition that makes clear that surrender can be a choice rather than ignorance. The Qur’an describes a response repeated whenever people are invited to follow what has been revealed: “Rather, we follow what we found our fathers following” (2:170). The structural point is that an alternative has been presented explicitly. The word “rather” marks a conscious preference between two offered paths, not ignorance of one of them. I present this as an inference, not as the only interpretation of the verse.

If dependence were simply ignorance, information would cure it. If it were only laziness, exhortation would cure it. But when it is a preference, information and exhortation pass over it.

Why a better guardian is not the answer

This leads to the practical conclusion I consider most important. The usual advice is to look for a more trustworthy authority: follow the reliable scholar, read the serious thinker, trust the genuine expert rather than the impostor. This advice is useful in its proper place, but it does not touch tutelage in its complete form. What is wanted is not merely an honest authority. It is someone who will end the question on your behalf. The more reliable authority may perform that service better, because he is better able to silence whatever doubt remains.

There is a rare and important stance in which a respected person refuses to be exempted from criticism and warns students against turning respect into praise. This may look like personal humility, but it is also a refusal of a contract offered to him: take responsibility for our consciences in exchange for relieving us. I know of no structural immunity against that offer. I know only that the person who accepts it serves those who ask in the short term, while taking from them something he cannot return.

A serious objection: is this not simply the division of intellectual labor?

No one can personally verify everything on which a life depends. I do not test the medicine I take, recalculate the engineering of every bridge I cross, or reproduce findings in a field I do not know. Relying on specialists is not a defect. It is the condition of accumulated human knowledge. Is every act of reliance therefore tutelage?

No. The difference is not the amount of reliance but where responsibility rests. When I trust a physician, responsibility for choosing that physician and continuing to follow the advice remains mine. In principle, I can ask for reasons, consult another physician and stop when circumstances require it. The advice remains contestable even if I do not contest it, and my responsibility has not moved to the physician. Tutelage occurs when both things move together: the advice becomes immune to challenge and my responsibility is carried by someone else, leaving me nothing for which I can be held answerable.

The practical test is simple. If the person you trust makes an obvious mistake, will you say, “I was wrong to choose him and to continue following him,” or “I only did what I was told”? The first answer keeps responsibility with you. The second is the price of the exchange described here.

Conclusion

We began with Kant’s list: a book that understands for us, a pastor who carries our conscience and a physician who decides for us. The most dangerous feature of the list is that its figures are not tyrants. Tutelage is requested rather than imposed. What is wanted from them is not only knowledge but responsibility, and this is why the condition cannot be cured by a better authority, a clearer statement or stronger exhortation.

I do not claim to possess the cure. I do claim that we ask the wrong question when we ask whom to follow. The better question is addressed to oneself, not to the authority:

When I make a mistake by following someone else, who made the mistake?

Sources

Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784): full text · Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, book 4, ch. 6: historical edition · Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941) · Qur’an 2:170: quran.com.