Responsibilities Are Possessions

metaphor

Source: Economics → Social Roles

Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguistics

From: Master Metaphor List

Transfers

Responsibilities are things you have, hold, carry, and sometimes drop. This metaphor maps the economics of possession — acquiring, bearing, transferring, and losing objects — onto the domain of social and moral obligation. Where PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS makes qualities into inventory, this metaphor makes duties into cargo. The person who has responsibilities is a person loaded down with things to carry; the person who shirks them has set those things down or passed them to someone else.

Key structural parallels:

• Having responsibilities as holding objects — “She has a lot on her plate.” “He’s carrying the weight of the department.” “They hold the responsibility for this decision.” Obligations are physical objects that occupy your hands, your plate, your shoulders. The more you have, the heavier the load.
• Accepting responsibility as taking an object — “She took on the project.” “He accepted the burden of leadership.” “They assumed responsibility.” To become obligated is to reach out and grasp something, or to have it placed in your hands. The voluntary nature of taking distinguishes it from having something thrust upon you.
• Avoiding responsibility as refusing or dropping an object — “He dodged the responsibility.” “She shirked her duties.” “They dropped the ball.” Irresponsibility is physically letting go of, or refusing to pick up, an object. The metaphor makes negligence feel concrete — you can almost hear the thud of the dropped obligation.
• Transferring responsibility as giving or passing — “She handed off the project.” “He delegated his responsibilities.” “They passed the buck.” When responsibility moves from one person to another, it moves the way objects do: from one set of hands to another. Delegation is a transfer of cargo.
• Shared responsibility as co-possession — “They share the burden.” “We all have a stake in this.” “The responsibility is ours.” Joint obligation is joint ownership. The metaphor enables talk about distributed duty by distributing the possessed object across multiple holders.

Limits

• Responsibilities are not discrete objects — the metaphor treats duties as countable, separable things. But responsibilities are often diffuse and overlapping. A parent’s responsibility for a child is not a single object that can be cleanly picked up or set down; it is a pervasive condition that infiltrates every aspect of life. The possession frame makes responsibilities feel more bounded and manageable than they often are.
• Dropping a responsibility does not make it disappear — if you drop a physical object, it lies on the ground until someone picks it up. But when someone shirks a responsibility, the consequences do not wait passively. Unmet obligations generate cascading failures, erode trust, and create new obligations for others. The possession metaphor underestimates the damage that neglected duties cause.
• The weight metaphor implies that responsibilities are inherently burdensome — “carrying the weight” and “bearing the burden” make duty feel like suffering. But many responsibilities are sources of meaning, identity, and satisfaction. The parent who “bears the burden” of childcare may also find it the most fulfilling part of their life. The possession-as-weight variant cannot express this duality.
• Transfer does not always reduce the giver’s load — “passing the buck” implies the original holder is now free. But in many social contexts, delegating responsibility does not eliminate accountability. A manager who delegates a task still bears responsibility for its completion. The possession metaphor imports a conservation law (what is given is no longer held) that misrepresents how accountability actually works in hierarchies.
• The metaphor obscures structural origins — responsibilities framed as possessions seem like things that individuals happen to have, rather than obligations that social structures impose. This makes it easy to blame individuals for having too many responsibilities (“She took on too much”) rather than questioning systems that distribute duties unevenly.

Expressions

• “She has a lot of responsibilities” — duties as possessed quantities (Master Metaphor List, Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991)
• “He carries the weight of the whole team” — obligation as heavy cargo borne on the body (common English usage)
• “They took on more than they could handle” — accepting duty as acquiring objects beyond one’s carrying capacity (common English usage)
• “She dropped the ball” — failing in a duty as releasing a held object (American English idiom)
• “He passed the buck” — transferring responsibility as passing an object to someone else (American English, from poker)
• “They share the burden equally” — joint obligation as co-possession of a heavy object (common English usage)
• “She shouldered the responsibility” — accepting duty as physically lifting cargo onto one’s shoulders (common English usage)
• “He dumped his responsibilities on her” — irresponsible transfer as careless unloading of cargo (common English usage)

Origin Story

RESPONSIBILITIES ARE POSSESSIONS appears in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991) as part of the broader family of possession metaphors that structure English thinking about abstract entities. It is closely related to PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS and OBLIGATIONS ARE FORCES, forming a cluster in which social and moral life is understood through the vocabulary of physical objects and their management. The metaphor is grounded in early childhood experiences of being given things to hold and carry — being entrusted with objects is one of the earliest forms of responsibility that children encounter.

The metaphor’s pervasiveness in institutional language (“job responsibilities,” “taking ownership,” “accountability”) reflects its centrality to how English-speaking cultures conceptualize duty. It enables the entire vocabulary of project management, corporate governance, and legal liability.

References

• Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Responsibilities Are Possessions”
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980) — ontological metaphors and the possession schema
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — the Event Structure metaphor system, object case

Related Entries

• Properties Are Possessions
• Obligations Are Forces
• Obligations Are Containers
• Action Is Control Over Possessions

Structural Neighbors

Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.

• Emotions Are Weather (weather/metaphor) flow, scale, cause, transform
• Regression to the Mean (probability/mental-model) balance, scale, cause, transform
• Temperature Is Creativity (physics/metaphor) balance, scale, cause, transform
• External Conditions Are Climate (natural-phenomena/metaphor) scale, cause, transform
• Make Hay While the Sun Shines (agriculture/metaphor) balance, cause, transform
• Separate the Wheat from the Chaff (agriculture/metaphor) balance, cause, transform
• Amara's Law (perception-and-cognition/mental-model) scale, cause, transform
• Incentive-Caused Bias (/mental-model)

Structural Tags

Patterns: balanceflowscale

Relations: causetransform

Structure: cycle Level: generic

Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner