A person would, could and should sort out these words so that what is said is clear and indubitable.
There are a number of concepts in moral philosophy that can be reduced to descriptions of fact and that is a worthwhile program because moral terms are leftovers from a religious insistence that morality is as real even if invisible as is the idea of God, trying to keep hold of spiritual things but without seeing gods in every tree or mountain. A good example of this is the idea of responsibility, which refers to the onus or burden of morality that is placed on an individual to do something that improves yourself or the lot of a set of people because of your circumstances, such as becoming a police officer who has to interfere with criminal events or a mentor who has to give sensible advice to students, or is even generalized to mean that all human beings are somehow responsible for the welfare of all other human beings, which can be taken to be the message of Jesus. Much of life involves our responsibilities rather than our pleasures or preferences and moral philosophy concerns what and how to comply with these matters, whether it means whether one is obligated to intrude when a friend makes a racist remark or to be a whistleblower or who to vote for if one candidate is harsh on the poor rather than a choice of whom to vote for because of a balance of interests.
It is easy enough to change “responsibility” as a term from moral life into a term that refers to a description of a situation by looking at the word literally. “Responsibility” means “the ability to respond”, which means that there are alternative ways in which a person can proceed, such as to go over the speed limit or court a potential spouse. A child, however, is regarded as insufficiently mentally mature to be able to consider the advantages and disadvantages of forming a contract and so such contracts are null and void. A six year old who shot his teacher will not be charged with a crime because he was not fit to create a crime even though his mother might be. I like to say don’t blame me, make me responsible, for my getting frail and elderly, even if I don’t exercise as much as I should. Blame it on God or genetic evolution, except that biology has no choice in that it just evolved and the possibility of that seems so cold that they prefer to think that God did it even though God left people to think about the inevitability of mortality, which is a cruel thing.
That change in the meaning of responsibility changes everything. It shifts focus from a sort of obligation set in place in laws that are enacted by God or man and therefore circumscribing life into an analysis of the situations of people having to do with their capabilities. Yes, criminals are responsible for their crimes and investors are responsible for having made risky decisions, but the real issue is that some people are better able to manage their lives than are other people. Some people find it hard to learn to read and poor people have disproportionate opportunities and so find stealing possible while embezzlement is not available and express anger in violence rather than trying to talk through a disagreement. Look at circumstances rather than at blame. This division between the two senses of responsibility is the one that divides Liberals and Conservatives, Liberals compassionate because they give people excuses while Conservatives follow a doctrine of tough love where everybody takes the consequences for their poor choices. The trouble with teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish is that some people live far from water.
A big difference between the moral and descriptive meaning of the word “responsibility" is that the moral meaning is that people violate an order of the world when they engage in infractions and so there has to be compensation or some other response for the violation. This leads to the creation of the doctrine of righteous suffering imposed by a clan or a government to, as they say, "right the balance”, which usually means punishment, because you can do that while rehabilitation is usually useless as a plan. There is not much to dfo other than over the ages make punishments less harsh and get rid of many crimes like witchcraft and miscegenation. Moral responsibility is cruel and unnecessary. But the descriptive meaning of responsibility offers a plethora of ways to interfere with flawed responsibility. You can ponder any number of ways in which to alter situations so that people are able to make choices. Give them food, shelter and prenatal care. Give them jobs or merely money, praise them for doing good, and research alternatives to incarceration.
But there is something to be said for preserving “responsibility” as a term that refers to two meanings. This ambivalence should remain for a statement that says “you are responsible to vote”. It means both that you can decide whether or not to vote, to take a preference whether to vote or not, and also that you are obliged to vote. Both are meaningful and persuasive and linked with one another in that a choice is made and whether it is a serious moral one is at question. And there are other matters about whether they rise to the occasion of morality, such as drag shows where children are allowed, something I had never heard of until recently, and I can’t yet decide whether this is a moral issue rather than a matter of taste. There are some things under heaven and earth that as of yet escape me.
Moreover, there is a solution as to whether to give precedence to one of the two meanings of responsibility. It depends on the object of the sentence. The moral meaning of responsibility occurs when a sentence invokes a moral matter, as in “You are responsible for the well being of your elderly parents”, while the descriptive meaning refers to sentences that can be serious but not morally fraught, as in “You are responsible for setting up the chairs at the dance” even though every job can be considered a moral obligation, which is what Kant and his disciple Weber thought. The real issue is whether to expand or contract the moral realm, put more or less of behavior into matters of judgment rather than morality, and the secular trend is to move sexuality and other personal things into judgment while making political things, like helping the homeless, into moral issues. That is the real division between Liberals and Conservatives, which issues are moral and which are prudential, though the sides switch, in that Conservatives think deficit spending is a crime, and so a moral matter, unless they are in power, while Liberals are all about how free speech is sacred and so a moral issue, unless some students are insulted by what teachers or students say, in which case the prudent course is to protect their feelings.
The grammatical rule whereby the meaning of an ambivalent word is referred to the object of the sentence is applicable to a trickier set of words. There are a class of modifiers, like “ought”, “should”, might”, and “could”, that are deeply embedded in language, perhaps more so than gender linked pronouns, like “he” and “she”, which suggest that gender is very deep in human consciousness rather than a mere custom, while titles like “Mr.” and “Mrs.” are just added on as courtesies, while the choices about intention may not be as deep as verb tenses, of which there is such a proliferation that speech was essentially concerned with organizing and recognizing the different kinds of time and therefore the state of temporal reality, weather it was just past or historical past. In fact, Kant thought that the necessity of the term “should” showed the necessity of free will or choice because people could not do without it.
Some of this set of modifiers about choices are distinct descriptions. “Might” means possible future action while “could” means capable of action. Other of these modifiers of choice, such as “ought '' and “should '' mean the same non-descriptive meaning, which is that there is a moral obligation to do what might be done, that the following action is in some sense required. But not in the sense of being forced, which can be considered a description of being coerced as when a person said “I need to do it or else I will be whipped.” Moral philosophers worry about when purely moral terms slide into being coercive and so regard morality as even independent even of God, at least since Abrfaham, for otherwise morality is just a constraint or an edict of God. So mortality is independent and so the question arises as to whether morality is connected to religion , only supported by religion and so not the basis of religion, however much Doestoevski says that there is no morality without God. In that case, the question arises as to where and what morality arises.
The naturalistic answer is that morality is a muddle, just a shorthand for saying some more elaborated description as when one says be kind to people so as to consider all the positive consequences of doing that and how painful it is for persons and society if people are mean to one another. In that case, following Hume, morality is not complicated. It just means the pleasantness of being nice. In similar fashion, Spinoza titled his major work “Ethics'' when what the book explains is how psychological and other natural processes just work.The job of moral philosophy is to abolish moral terminology.
What that means, in a Kantian context, is to reduce as much as possible the application of the word “should” as much as possible, which Kant does by giving so much of life reason over to judgment, which applies to all the choices available in the supermarket unless one engages with the dietary police who declare it bad to eat sweets or cigarettes when an adequate description is possible, which is that cigarette smoking is bad only because it leads to cancer and other ill effects. Moreover, the invocation of “should” leads to anger and animosity towards people who have lapsed on their obligations or on oneself for having failed at one’s own obligations, everyone to be judged for one reason or another to be a miscreant rather the subject to circumstances, which means not a victim, which is pathetic, but rather overwhelmed so as not to continue a more fruitful course of action.
The way grammer comes to the rescue of limiting blame, which is what getting rid of “should” does, is by referring to the predicate of the sentence as instructing the word “should” to be eliminated and replaced with a descriptive word. Consider the sentence “ I ought to go to church so as to exalt God.”. First off, the meaning of the sentence is off because you don’t need an injunction to worship God, even if the church is half an hour away or it is a cold and windy day, because extolling God is the natural aspect of a human being, what God has created people to do, and so hardly a burden to carry, though an atheist like myself might think God had better things to do with his time than to glow at the adulation of people. Maybe God could cure cancer. More importantly, the sentence can be reformed into “I might go to church because I am reminded of higher things and to experience communal feelings”. An explanation always substitutes a descriptive voiced modifier for an imperative one. Now try out the big one: “Thou shalt not kill”. That means “It is not a good idea to kill because it abolishes a person and makes the perpetrator feel bad and because it unsettles the society”. Any number of reasons can be offered. The truth of the matter is the consequences rather than the imperative.
Now it might be that some people prefer or feel comfortable with dealing switch imperatives because that gives them less responsibility to select preferences. A Private First Class I knew of liked his rank because he didn’t have to decide how to order other people around. There is psychological security in having orders all the way up to God, but the modern world, for better or worse, prefers individuality, which means self preference, to authority. Authority is, as I said, the more primitive approach, however much Durkheim wanted to restore it as the essential dynamic. I refer to an even older text as showing this division: the story of Joseph, at the end of “Genesis". Joseph was a great modernizer. He used the government to serve the people by organizing silos to offset the natural cycle of drought. But what does he do when he is confronted by his brothers who had sold him into slavery years before? He demands the presence of his youngest brother and then forgives them all supposedly now to praise him for his mercy, Joseph now a God and his brothers now his followers. It just isn’t easy to give up being either a God or a follower.