GRE写作优秀范文：个人责任

　　The concept of ’individual responsibility’ is a necessary fiction. Although societies must hold individuals accountable for their own actions, people’s behavior is largely determined by forces not of their own making.

　　个人责任的概念是一种很必要的虚构。尽管社会必须让个人对他们自己的行为负责，但是人们的行为很大程度上不是自己能够左右的。

　　Admittedly it is true that forces play a vital role in determining people’s behavior, but one should not go too far to deny the equal importance of individual responsibility. In many cases, it is individual responsibility that is at stake, far over the use of forces.

　　In the first place, forces are not omnipotent and there are many occasions on which forces fail to take effect and therefore must resort to individual responsibility to regulate people’s behavior. Take marital infidelity for example. Undoubtedly, this behavior is immoral and should be condemned because it severely harms the stability of family and thus impacts negative effects on the development of children. However,hardly can the use of compulsory forces such as laws take effect in preventing the occurrence of this disloyal behavior. The reason for impotency of forces on this occasion is that any attempt to prevent marital infidelity has a great possibility to unduly interfere with individual affairs and seriously violate individual freedom.Therefore, the society has no choice but to turn to individual responsibility for marital loyalty and stability of family.

　　Also there are many cases where only combined with the use of individual responsibility can forces exert their power to the utmost. Laws can require corporations to be responsible for their consumers and thus can partly ensure the legitimate rights of consumers, but whether consumers can enjoy the best products or services primarily depends on the social responsibility of those corporations rather than the use of laws; likewise, laws require individuals to comply with public morality and even set up some regulations to punish behaviors of violating public morality, but without individuals’ identification with these laws and thus the shape of individual responsibility, can hardly these compulsory measures work well. This is why the state of public morality is still very bad in many developing countries although they have set up numerous regulations and laws to punish violation of public morality.

　　Last but not the least, even under the circumstances where forces play a dominant role in regulating the behavior of people, the society must try its best to cultivate individual responsibility to substitute for the use of forces more or less, because forces are always associated with high social cost and negative effects on the society. If all corporations can follow laws and behave accountable for their consumers, all citizens can act in the interests of nation, all political figures can work for the public benefit automatically, there would be no necessity to maintain such a large-scale compulsory forces—police, army, prison, judge and so on--in the society and as a result, all the social members will greatly benefit from the reduction in social cost.