From “Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most” by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
To help us out, we’ll turn to Smokey Bear, America’s iconic forest fire prevention representative. For those who aren’t familiar with him, Smokey Bear is a cartoon character created by the United States Forest Service for their public service campaigns to prevent wildfires. Since 1944, he has appeared, clad in jeans and a round-brimmed hat, on road signs, in print ads, and in television public service announcements in the middle of Saturday morning cartoons. Until 2001, his signature line was “Only you can prevent forest fires.” (It’s not “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Grasslands matter too!)
Three distinct senses of responsibility are captured in this single ursine admonition.
First, there’s the “only you.” This is the agent of responsibility, the responsible self. Now, Smokey’s not trying to say that you are literally the only one on the planet who can prevent forest fires. What he means is something like the sort of responsibility for your life that we talked about in the introduction. You have an inalienable responsibility for your life, choices, and actions. Including, as it turns out, whether or not you properly extinguish your campfire. Even if you tried to give this responsibility away, that would still be a way of exercising it. (Only you, after all, could try to give away the unique responsibility for your life that only you have.)
Then there’s the bit about the forest. This is the scope of your responsibility. It’s often the sort of responsibility we think of first: what we’re responsible for, what we have to do, whose well-being we need to take into consideration. To get a full understanding of our responsibilities, we have to ask, How big is our forest? Maybe we’re responsible for acting virtuously. Maybe we’re responsible for the happiness of every sentient being, present and future. The scope of our responsibility is a crucial question. It’s one of the key features of any answer we give to a question we’ll come to in chapter 6: How should we live? We’ll save “forest” responsibility for that chapter.
But then there’s the guy with his finger in our chests: Smokey Bear. He represents the authoritative source of our responsibility to prevent forest fires. He represents the one to whom we are responsible. He defines the rules that put us under the obligation to handle fires responsibly. He assesses whether we are, in fact, doing what we can and should to prevent forest fires. And he calls us to account when we fall short, holding us to the relevant forest fire prevention standards. Smokey is a lawgiver, judge, and law enforcement official in one. (We don’t need to quibble about precisely how he represents the authoritative source of responsibility or why the source is authoritative. That’s what the rest of this chapter is for.) This is the kind of responsibility this chapter is about: “Smokey” responsibility. We’ll focus especially on the question, Where does our responsibility to live a certain kind of life come from?