Ethics After Subjects: 4 Repair vs Blame: Why Punishment Feels Satisfying — and Why It Usually Fails

When harm persists, pressure builds. Something must be done. The system demands response.

Blame offers itself immediately.

It identifies a culprit, assigns fault, and promises relief. Punishment follows, and with it a sense of moral closure. Something has been accounted for.

But in temporally thick systems, this satisfaction is almost always misleading.

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Why Blame Feels Right

Blame does real work — just not the work it claims to do.

Blame:

• localises diffuse harm

• converts structural failure into individual action

• creates a narrative of causation

• produces a moment of decisiveness

In systems where binding is distributed and persistence is uneven, blame feels stabilising because it compresses complexity.

It gives the appearance of resolution.

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The Structural Failure of Blame

The problem is not that blame is morally harsh.

The problem is that blame is structurally misaligned.

Blame addresses origin.

But most ethical harm persists independently of origin.

In temporally thick systems:

• harms are inherited

• constraints are sedimented

• futures are pre-shaped

• authorship is diluted or irretrievable

Punishing a node in the system does not unbind the constraint that produced the harm. It often leaves the binding intact — or worse, reinforces it by stabilising the surrounding structure.

Blame feels like action while allowing the system to continue unchanged.

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Repair as Structural Intervention

Repair operates differently.

Repair does not ask:

• Who caused this?

• Who deserves punishment?

It asks:

• What binding is producing this harm?

• Where is rebindability blocked?

• What constraint must be loosened?

• Who is positioned to do that work?

Repair is not redemptive.

It is operative.

It intervenes in structure, not character.

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Why Repair Is Harder Than Blame

Repair lacks the satisfactions that make blame appealing.

• It is slower.

• It distributes effort unevenly.

• It rarely produces narrative closure.

• It often assigns responsibility to those least emotionally “at fault”.

Repair also exposes asymmetry. It reveals who must carry the cost of persistence — and who has been shielded from it.

This is why repair is frequently resisted, even when harm is acknowledged.

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Punishment as Displacement

Punishment often functions as ethical displacement.

By assigning guilt, the system:

• relocates pressure away from persistent bindings

• converts structural exhaustion into moral failure

• protects privileged constraints from scrutiny

Punishment does not remove moral residue.

It reroutes it.

This is why cycles of blame tend to recur. The underlying constraint remains, and pressure rebuilds.

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Ethics Without Catharsis

Ethics after subjects offers no catharsis.

There is no final reckoning, no purification through punishment, no moment when responsibility dissolves. There is only ongoing work: binding, unbinding, repair, redistribution.

This does not make ethics weaker.

It makes it inescapable.

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Where This Leads

Repair reveals something blame obscures:

ethical work is inseparable from power.

• Who has the capacity to repair?

• Who controls the conditions of rebindability?

• Who decides which constraints are negotiable?

• Who absorbs the cost when repair is deferred?

These are ethical questions — but they are also questions of asymmetry, authority, and endurance.

The next post moves directly into that terrain:

Who Must Carry the Weight

How ethical burden is unevenly distributed.

From here, ethics and power will no longer be separable.