RE: Freedom Comes with Responsibilities
Jean Paul Satre, following Nietzsche, described the condition you're talking about as 'Monstrous Freedom' - which is basically the terrifying realization that as humans we always have a choice, and with that choice comes, as you say, responsibility.
Neither seems to have done a very good job of thinking through exactly how the free individual can lead an ethical (responsible) life - Nietzsche went mad, and Satre reverted to Marxism in his later years, recognizing the fact that in order to be responsible, the individual has do do something to consciously shape the environment in which he/ she lives (whether communism, or a move towards to communism is the right answer here remains open to debate).
A more recent development of Nietzsche lies in the work of Michel Foucault - his main thing was to point out that individuals might like to think of themselves as free, but actually they are subtly 'governed' by a neoliberal order which 'commands' them to take responsibility as 'autonomous individuals' - that is, the very way we think of the self-morality-freedom nexus is itself steered by a late-capitalist neoliberal political economy which refuses to 'take care' of people.
Foucault actually (although this is not widely known) saw some potential for responsible-liberation in Zen Buddhism, although it also seems that he was too busy exploring the liberating potential of gay sex orgies to explore Zen in any great depth before he died of aids in the 1980s!
Whether we need Marxism, Zen Buddhism, or just more kinky gay sex to further the ethical-liberation of humanity is also open to further debate.
He gave it a great name because it is hard to realize something like this indeed especially that people don't like to be in control and they always choose to be lead by someone just because they are protected from blame.
The thing with ethics is that they are subjective, different for everybody and what someone may consider as a responsible, ethical way of living their life may not seem so ethical for someone else.
I love that, "like to think of themselves as free, but actually, they are subtly 'governed'", I think this is how most people live their lives, probably even us. In some way or another we, as humans are influenced by all the bullshit going on around us thus being free and acting on our will is never easy.
I think that we don't have any idea what we need since we're in this little box that we cannot transcend thus we cannot accept the real truth.
Thanks a lot for your comment, I love it. :D
You should check out some Zygmunt Bauman on ethics, he spent a lot of his life trying to figure out what ethics might look like in a postmodern society where individuals are (essentially) free - he basically (I think) argues that ethical behaviour is behaviour in which we always take account of 'the other' - we have care for them as our starting point for deciding whether we should engage in a course of action - thus ethical behavior will quite often be about not doing, rather than just 'doing what I like' - and this also allows for judgement, responsibility, contextual differences. He has a rather minimalist and generalist approach, but I kind of like it - something is ethical if people act out of caring for others. That makes it social, not individual.
Some people take the concept of ethics a step further and suggest we actually need to codify it in some kind of social rules - Jurgen Habermas for example.
TBH The issues of freedom and ethics were never my main interest, but I just got so far into social theory a few years back - and there they were... recurring themes!
Cheers!