CCC- Casual Collegehosue Conversations - Collective Responsibility

Stop by the Cafe du Soleil on the Mezzanine for a cup of tea, conversation, and a small snack at 9PM tonight.

I have been thinking about collective responsibility today. The big question is: when are we responsible for each other?

I was so excited—at dining today there was a crumpled napkin on the floor near the exit. While most seemed to walk past it, one student in front of me bent over, picked it up, and threw it out. It was not his napkin. He didn’t drop it. His friend didn’t drop it. It was just there. His eyes were open, he saw it, he recognized it belonged in the trash, and he picked it up and threw it out.

When was the last time you picked up a piece of trash that was not yours and threw it out for the sake of a cleaner shared environment? I asked myself this question and by sharing it here, I am asking you, gentle reader, too. When was the last time you took care of something that wasn’t your responsibility, that didn’t have much of a net benefit to you personally, but benefited others? (And this is not a question about community service that you list on a university/grad school application.)

Also at the dining hall today, someone pressed the button for automatic pancakes, didn’t put a plate on the lazy susan, and left. Their two pancakes were promptly made and delivered to the slowly spinning tray. They never came back for their pancakes, and so they sat there rotating around and around. Other students came up to have pancakes and noticed the abandoned and lonely pancakes; thinking ahead, they pressed the button for their own two pancakes and held their plate aloft, avoiding crushing the lonely ones, and awkwardly awaited theirs. They got theirs and left. Then another person did the same thing but instead of holding their plate, they took the tongs and removed one pancake at a time to their plate. Instead of picking up trash today, I went over to the pancake machine and picked up the abandoned pancakes and threw them out. It wasn’t my job. I don’t work at dining. I didn’t even have pancakes today. The point is, what does it take to take ownership of a collective good, especially one that doesn’t personally benefit you? Are Penn people different than other university people? Are Penn people different from non-university people?

I especially asked myself this question today when the Allied Universal guard was throwing out spoiled delivery food left in the front space at Harnwell. Since the package system changed at Penn, we’ve been getting lots of seemingly abandoned packages in Harnwell. This is not unique to us. Check out life in Cambridge, MA<https://www.cambridgeday.com/2021/11/11/with-30-packages-dumped-in-the-wrong-lobby-resident-tried-harder-to-correct-it-than-amazon/>, where our consumerist culture just orders boxes of stuff, where they get abandoned, and Amazon says, just throw them out. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” is the attitude. But this morning the Allied guard, who probably makes less than $20/hour, was throwing out the abandoned perishable food. Who cares that every package represented the economic value of her work? This student ordered and put their mailing address in Harnwell rather than their delivery address in some other building. Who cares, it’s just $20. It’s not worth the headache. That person ordered a midnight snack to feed the munchies they had and then fell asleep. Who cares, they fell asleep anyway, and it was just $17. Another person had their family order on Instacart, or Acme, some more nutritious food because their parent was worried about them. A gallon of milk here, some fresh vegetables there. Mom was worried, offspring wanted to maintain their autonomy, oh well, $40 in fresh groceries has to go into the trash. Before the task was over, the Allied Universal guard’s entire shift wage equivalence was thrown away. How is this ok? How is it respectful? How is it not wasteful? Of course, there is no law against people wasting their own money; and there are laws against people taking other people’s things, so it has to get thrown away. What is our collective responsibility for this?

When we are uncomfortable, we regress to municipal, state, or national law as a cognitive defense rather than accept an indictment from the natural law<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/> of humanity. How do we hold ourselves accountable for a collective good?

Finally, this morning I received an email from Sean Mullen who has been writing a weekly Substack<https://open.substack.com/pub/semullen/p/an-empire-over-yourself?r=6kgufp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false>. In it, he writes about the spouse of a famous and wealthy Philadelphian who expressed her gratitude more than 225 years ago to George Washington, another wealthy, famous, and seemingly powerful person. In the message, Mullen reflects:

"We are living in an era that is characterized by a crisis of leadership - in the state, in the church, in academia, and in business. We look for models of meaningful and effective leadership that labors for the common good. Part of what is striking about Elizabeth Powel’s estimation of George Washington is that she reaches the climax in her eloquent estimation, not of his military prowess or political acumen, but of his self control: “you possess an Empire over yourself.”"

I think my questions above are actually only asking: do we possess empire over ourselves? When our cognitive bias tells us it is not our responsibility to contribute to the collective, do we have the self-control to check our beliefs? Are we willing to check our desire for more power, wealth, and admiration, and instead contribute to the good of each other without taking advantage?

Of course, it is a rhetorical question. Of course we do. What is stopping us from doing it?

Perhaps it is easy to ask these questions when we are privileged to live in the bubble of comfort that Penn provides in some way to us all. It is not unlike the privileges afforded Elizabeth Powell and George Washington, though we each got here in a different way with different life experiences from Powell and Washington. I am grateful for the opportunity that the bubble provides for so many.

Join me for tea, conversation, and snacks on the mezzanine from 9–10PM tonight, 28 September 2025.