OnCommonGround was given the exclusive right to excerpt this essay from the anthology, Rethinking Responsibility: Reflection on Sex and Accountability, published by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. For more OnCommonGround excerpts in this series click here.

Too often, our political debates cast personal and social
responsibility as ideas in opposition to each other. Those who
emphasize social responsibility and highlight the structural and
economic causes of social problems are seen as ignoring the
responsibilities of individuals for their own fate. Those who emphasize
personal responsibility and highlight the ways in which individual
decisions lie behind high rates of crime, teen pregnancy, and family
breakup are seen as indifferent to social justice and the obligations
of the community toward its least privileged members.

It’s true, of course, that advocates of social responsibility sometimes
understate the responsibilities of individuals, and those who stress
personal responsibility are sometimes unwilling to acknowledge the high
costs of racial discrimination and economic inequalities. But if ever
there was a false choice, this is it. Of course we are responsible for
ourselves and for our own decisions. All of us are called upon to be
responsible in our own lives. But surely social responsibility is a
component of individual responsibility. We are responsible for
ourselves, but also for our families and those we love, for our
communities and, ultimately, for our country, and our world. To pick a
classic example: family breakup is often a cause of poverty. But
poverty is often a cause for family breakup. High crime rates are
caused by the acts of irresponsible individuals. But high crime rates
are associated with poverty. To put matters simply: Poverty causes
crime, and crime causes poverty.

The great social scientist
James Q. Wilson spoke a powerful conservative truth when he declared:
“In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.” But
there is a comparable liberal truth: that private virtue can be
nurtured by wise public policy and thoughtful public action. David
Shipler put it well in his 2004 book, The Working Poor when
he called for a war on poverty that “recognizes both the society’s
obligation through government and business, and the individual’s
obligation through labor and family.”

In the struggle
against teen and unplanned pregnancy, real progress came when we put
aside culture war arguments. This issue, more than almost any other,
reminds us that a great social need — the care and well-being of
children — is best met when individuals behave responsibly. But the
success achieved in lowering teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s
especially depended powerfully on social factors ranging from new
public policies to rising prosperity that afforded new opportunities to
young women.

Liberals tend to speak out against one set of
sins: materialism, prejudice, racism, sexism, a lack of individual and
social generosity. Conservatives tend to speak out against a different
set of sins: personal irresponsibility, hedonism, a lack of regard for
the importance of family life and the responsibilities of parenthood.
We would do well to end this fruitless argument over which sins are
worse. We should try to discover the virtues that help us overcome both
sets of human frailties by remembering that individual responsibility
and the common good are indivisible.