Incentives matter: personal responsibility file

Successful attempts to shift the responsibility for bad decisions toward others and to society more generally create a "moral hazard" in behavior. If individuals are not held accountable for decisions and actions that harm themselves or others, they have less incentive to act responsibly in the first place since they will escape some or all of the bad consequences of their actions. It does not matter greatly whether this moral hazard resulted from the shifting of blame for unsuccessful actions to the "small print" in a contract, to an abused childhood, to a mental state, or to many other efforts to shift responsibility away from oneself.

That's Gray Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility. Richard Posner's comments are here.