Ethics After Subjects: 6 Neutrality Is a Lie: How Ethical Asymmetry Stabilises as Power

Ethical asymmetry rarely announces itself as domination.

More often, it presents as neutrality.

The system insists it is merely operating as designed. No one intended harm. No one chose this distribution. No values were imposed. Things simply work this way.

This is the final transformation of ethical burden into power.

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The Fiction of Neutral Operation

Neutrality is not the absence of values.

It is the concealment of constraint.

When a system claims neutrality, it asserts that:

• obligations are impersonal

• burdens are unavoidable

• outcomes are procedural

• no one is responsible

But we have already seen that obligation persists, burden accumulates, and repair is unevenly distributed. Neutrality does not remove these facts. It renders them non-negotiable.

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From Ethical Asymmetry to Power

Power emerges where ethical asymmetry becomes stable.

When:

• the same positions repeatedly absorb breakdown

• the same actors must adapt

• the same futures are foreclosed

• the same constraints are treated as fixed

— ethical pressure hardens into structure.

Power is not something possessed.

It is what no longer has to respond.

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Why Power Does Not Need Agents

Traditional accounts of power look for actors: rulers, elites, decision-makers. But in temporally thick systems, power often operates without intention or command.

Power resides in:

• which bindings are protected from revision

• which obligations are taken for granted

• which burdens are normalised

• which repairs are deemed unrealistic

No one has to decide this.

The system enforces it.

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Neutrality as Ethical Closure

Neutrality functions as a surrogate for closure.

Where repair would require reopening bindings, neutrality declares the matter settled. Where ethical pressure remains, neutrality treats it as noise.

This is how systems continue after Gödel:

• not by resolving incompleteness

• but by declaring some constraints non-questionable

Neutrality is the mechanism by which incompleteness becomes lived reality.

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The Cost of Neutrality

Neutral systems exhaust selectively.

They produce:

• chronic strain without crisis

• obligation without recognition

• repair without authority

• guilt without blame

These are not side effects.

They are the operating costs of stability.

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Closing Ethics After Subjects

This series has argued that ethics:

• does not require subjects

• does not begin with intention

• does not end with blame

• cannot rely on closure

Ethics persists because binding persists.

Responsibility survives because repair remains necessary.

Burden accumulates because systems must go on.

Power emerges when this becomes normal.

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What Comes Next

We are now positioned precisely at the threshold of the next series:

Power Without Agents

Asymmetry, endurance, and the stabilisation of constraint.

There, we will examine:

• how power operates without decision

• how silence is produced

• how adaptation is enforced

• how resistance appears without subjects

Ethics has brought us here by following obligation to its structural limit.

Power begins where neutrality claims to end the conversation.