I can't help but wonder if everyone downvoting people preaching personal responsibility are also part of the problem. As a society today (in America at least),

I can't help but wonder if everyone downvoting people preaching personal responsibility are also part of the problem. As a society today (in America at least), we're increasingly condemning those preaching personal responsibility in almost every venue, or at least every liberal venue. There's still some push for personal responsibility amongst conservatives. In a way, this appears to be a result of recency bias and our collective forgetting that preaching personal responsibility was once the norm in western societies. While I'm an atheist myself, long before there was any government social safety net, the church provided this safety net, but when it did, that safety net came with the expectation of learning lessons like "God helps those that help themselves". As a society, yes it's important to have empathy for other who have made mistakes. Even Judeo-Christian religion makes room for this lesson through stories like the prodigal son. But you can't just have empathy without accountability unless you're willing to accept that more people will become a burden on the productive than if you have a culture of accountability. You've got to have a balance between both empathy and accountability and squelching voices promoting accountability, but downvoting for example, throws this balance out of whack.