A Wall Street failure who takes his own life isn't doing anything honorable.

A better approach might be to accept that it is not easy, or immediately rewarding, to “take responsibility.” Forgoing this year’s bonus might be a start, but even that doesn’t really do the trick.

After John Thain stuck his toe in the water and got it chewed off by piranhas (a bit unfairly, as he really had nothing to do with creating the mess and did a great job saving Merrill Lynch), Wall Street’s top brass seems to have agreed that it is generally not a good idea for them to accept performance bonuses for 2008.

But that doesn’t account for the past five or more years of ill-gotten gains, and the trillions of dollars of economic losses caused by Wall Street’s fantastic misallocation of capital.

The Swiss Bank UBS has come up with a better idea: give some of the money back. The former CEO of UBS, along with some of the bank’s other executives, agreed to re-pay bonuses they received based on the phony profits of the credit bubble. For very senior executives who made hundreds of millions of dollars the act is obviously not merely just but useful, and even cathartic.

Why on earth should Stan O’Neal, Chuck Prince and Jimmy Cayne still be walking around with billions of dollars that they never should have been paid in the first place?

But these are baby steps toward some more general redemption. The vast majority of the people who might feel a desire to take responsibility for their role in our financial catastrophe are out of the public eye and not in a position to give vast sums of money back.