If ethics no longer begins with a subject, then blame cannot be its foundation.
Blame presupposes intention, authorship, or at least negligence — a story about who did something. But many of the obligations that structure social life persist even when no such story can be told. No one intended the harm. No one chose the outcome. And yet the damage remains.
Ethical force survives the absence of fault.
This is where liability enters.
From Blame to Liability
Blame asks: Who is at fault?
Liability asks: Where does the burden fall?
These are not competing moral concepts. They answer different structural questions.
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Blame concerns origin.
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Liability concerns consequence.
In a semiotic system that persists without closure, origins are often irretrievable or irrelevant. What matters is not how a binding arose, but how it continues to constrain.
Liability attaches not to intention, but to position within a field of constraint.
Structural Liability
A system distributes constraint unevenly. Some positions absorb breakdown; others are insulated from it. Some actors — human or institutional — are situated such that their adaptation can restore coordination, while others cannot.
Liability emerges wherever repair is possible.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a structural fact.
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A platform becomes liable when it mediates coordination, even if it did not create the content.
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An institution becomes liable when it stabilises patterns that continue to produce harm, even if it inherited them.
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An individual becomes liable when they occupy a position that can modulate binding, even if they did not author it.
Liability is not punishment.
It is the pressure to repair.
Why Fault Is Often a Distraction
The search for blame can obscure liability.
When systems are complex and temporally thick:
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causes are distributed
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intentions are diluted
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responsibility is inherited rather than chosen
Insisting on fault before action delays repair. It treats ethics as adjudication rather than maintenance.
In many cases, the ethical failure is not that no one is guilty —
it is that everyone waits for guilt before acting.
Repair as Ethical Work
Once liability replaces blame, ethics becomes practical rather than punitive.
Repair does not require:
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confession
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absolution
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moral consensus
It requires structural intervention:
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loosening constraints
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redistributing burden
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reopening blocked futures
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re-establishing rebindability
Liability names who must do that work, not who deserves condemnation.
Liability Without Innocence
Crucially, liability without blame does not imply innocence.
A system can impose liability even when:
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harm was unavoidable
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damage was inherited
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constraints were unknown
Ethics after subjects is not about moral purity.
It is about who must act when harm persists.
This is why liability can feel unfair — and why it is unavoidable.
The Stakes
If ethics remains tied to blame, then:
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systemic harm appears morally invisible
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inherited obligations feel illegitimate
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exhaustion becomes moralised
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repair is endlessly deferred
Liability without blame allows ethics to function after closure, inside temporally thick systems where fault is undecidable but persistence is not.
What Comes Next
Liability identifies where ethical force attaches.
The next question is how that force is experienced and distributed.
The next post will take us there:
Guilt, Shame, and Moral Residue
Why affect survives even when blame is misplaced.
There we will examine how ethical pressure appears emotionally — without treating emotion as its source.
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