When do you take the blame? When do you simply say, “Hey, I screwed up, it’s my fault”?

These are not just rhetorical questions. I’ve been reading a lot on the grilling Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld Jr. got this week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the collapse of the venerable 150-year-old financial firm into bankruptcy. Fuld was on the bridge when Lehman Brothers hit the financial iceberg, but unlike Titanic Capt. Edward John Smith, he didn’t go down when Lehman did. Not financially, at least.

In fact, the noteworthy thing to me about Fuld’s testimony to Congress is that he seemed to want to have it both ways, taking “responsibility” for what happened to Lehman while at the same time blaming just about anyone else he could find for causing the financial crisis that led to the company’s demise.

“In sometimes halting language,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Fuld said that while he takes responsibility for decisions the firm made, he believes that Lehman was brought down by outside forces including lax oversight and ‘short sellers,’ traders who were betting Lehman’s stock price would fall.”

“Lawmakers … questioned Fuld about why he for years failed to rein in risky investments, paid huge severance packages to departing executives even as the company was seeking federal help, and told analysts that the company’s balance sheet was strong five days before it filed for bankruptcy,” according to The Washington Post.

“Fuld blamed the news media. He blamed the short-sellers. He blamed the government, as well as what he characterized as an ‘extraordinary run on the bank,’ ”The New York Times noted. “But the chief executive of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the bankrupt remnant of a once-great investment house, never really blamed himself.”

Fuld made a lot of money at Lehman Brothers: “Lawmakers estimated that Fuld pocketed roughly $480 million in pay since 2000, [although Fuld] suggested that his pay was closer to $350 million in that time,” the Journal reported. He also paid out tens of millions to departing Lehman executives just days before the company filed for bankruptcy. So this makes me wonder: What really is Fuld taking responsibility for? And does taking responsibility equate to taking blame?

The word “responsibility” has a lot of definitions, but the one that hits closest to home for me is that it is a “form of trustworthiness; the trait of being answerable to someone for something or being responsible for one’s conduct.” Blame, on the other hand, is “the state of having caused a bad event; to assert that something or someone caused a bad event; to place blame upon.” But it’s also defined as “to hold another person or group responsible for perceived faults real, imagined or merely invented for pejorative purposes. Blame is an act of censure, reproach and often outright condemnation.”

In other words, Fuld is responsible for his conduct as it relates to his leadership and management of Lehman Brothers, but he’s not to blame for the terrible things that happened to the company, at least not in his own mind. And this is precisely the kind of response that makes reasonable, common-sense people ask: Just what was it that Lehman Brothers was paying Richard Fuld those hundreds of millions of dollars for anyway? Was it to blame others for things that happened on his watch and with his blessing?

For most people, blame is something that comes with responsibility. When you are responsible, you get the blame—or in better times, the credit—for all the things that happen in your area of responsibility. That’s how it goes in the real world of management, but unfortunately, that’s not how it works on Wall Street.

I wish for once that some high-level executive, somewhere, would say, “Hey, it was my fault. I screwed up big time. And by the way, I don’t deserve that big financial package I’ve been getting. You should take it back.”

That’s a pipe dream, I know. But if we are ever going to get serious about affixing blame and holding people responsible for bad decisions and actions they take, someone needs to take the first step and fall on his sword. Too bad it couldn’t have been Richard Fuld.