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shops on Tesshu's route.  They then all went about their business, surreptitiously keeping an eye out for Tesshu to come past.  A little while later at just his usual time Tesshu was walking  the way he always walked.  As he approached the horse, everyone watched with baited breath... but just before Tesshu got to where the horse was tied up, he crossed the street and walked by on the other side!
     
    I would say that Tesshu dismissed his student for a lack of responsibility.  His knee-jerk reaction showed amazing skill, but he lacked the awareness required to be able to respond effectively to the world around him.  What if the horse had been injured or had got more distressed and hurt someone else?  That said, Tesshu was a master and it's important to remember that we are all human-beings and while we can aspire to the highest of standards we will all slip sometimes – I suspect even Tesshu had moments where he stumbled on the path!
     
    One of the very clear instances where Ned Stark shows his strong sense of responsibility is right at the beginning where he is beheading a deserter from the Night's Watch.  He says:
     
    “The man who passes a sentence should swing the sword.” [xiii]
     
    In this he is a true leader taking a very hard decision but he takes full responsibility for his decision and  bears the consequences of it.  He must take a man's life, rather than have someone else do it for him.  One of the other negative outcomes of avoiding taking full responsibility for our choices is that we can psychologically distance ourselves from them.  It becomes easier to make choices which we know in our hearts are not honourable choices, or even morally congruent choices when we can distance ourselves from the outcomes.  In a wonderful talk, economist and researcher Dan Ariely [10] talks about how this shows up in a small way.  Some of his research has been to look at honesty and dishonesty and how we apply our moral code.  In the example he describes they were getting people to do a task for the experiment and then report their own scores, the higher the score, the more they got paid for taking part.  They had university students as test subjects and found that the reported average was higher than the measured average (so clearly people were exaggerating their scores – lying!), but when they got people to promise on the honour code of the university that they were being honest the reported results became more accurate – even though that university has no honour code!  What this tells me is that when people are connected to their sense of values, they act with more integrity.  Without the reminder of the honour-code, they could 'fudge' it in their heads.  They could say to themselves “well, it's about right” or “it's only a little bit...”  Once they were connected with the reality that if they 'stretched the truth' they were breaking with their own sense of integrity, they got more honest – with themselves and others.  In a larger way, it is part of the dialogue around the warrior's path in the modern military that it is much less clear how to be a true warrior in modern times than in history.  When you have to stand toe-to-toe with someone and fight for your life then your courage is not in question, but when you can shoot them from two kilometres away, or press a button and end hundreds or even thousands of lives it becomes abstract.  How much do you really have to live with the consequences of your actions?  And therefore, how carefully do you consider your choices before you act?  Ned Stark deliberately keeps himself face-to-face with the choices he makes and in doing so, I would say that he holds himself to a higher standard and will think much more carefully before he sentences a man to die.
    I think it is one of the great challenges of our time to keep ourselves face-to-face with the consequences of our choices because that is part of what will help us to make good choices and