In the previous post, individuation was located in commitment: perspectives stabilise over time through binding futures, not through intrinsic identity. That move already unsettles a familiar assumption — that commitment presupposes a committing subject.
Responsibility unsettles it further.
Responsibility is usually treated as the moral corollary of agency: someone acts, therefore someone is responsible. On this view, responsibility must belong to an individual bearer.
This post breaks that link.
The Ownership Model of Responsibility
In its most familiar form, responsibility is understood through an ownership model:
actions are owned by agents
obligations are owned by persons
responsibility is assigned to individuals
This model feels intuitive because it aligns neatly with legal, moral, and psychological practices. But analytically, it does something costly.
It makes responsibility depend on the prior individuation of subjects.
If responsibility must be owned, then individuals must already be there to own it.
Why Ownership Will Not Do
Once individuation is treated as an outcome rather than a premise, the ownership model becomes untenable.
From the perspective developed here, responsibility often:
arises before any clear agent is identifiable
persists after agents change or disappear
distributes itself across multiple sites simultaneously
Responsibility cannot be reduced to a property of persons without losing sight of how it actually operates.
Responsibility as Semiotic Phenomenon
Responsibility emerges from modulation.
When proposals are modulated — as obligatory, expected, required, or unavoidable — they stabilise futures and allocate weight.
That weight is responsibility.
Importantly, modulation does not ask who owns the obligation. It simply makes deviation costly and alignment expected.
Responsibility, on this view, is not bestowed. It condenses.
Distributed Responsibility
Because modulation operates across interactional networks, responsibility is inherently distributed.
It may attach simultaneously to:
multiple participants in an interaction
institutional roles rather than their incumbents
procedures that constrain action
artefacts that carry obligation forward
No single site exhausts responsibility. Ethical weight is spread across a configuration.
Positional Responsibility
Responsibility is also positional.
It attaches to perspectives, not persons.
To occupy a position within a semiotic field is to inherit:
certain expectations
certain obligations
certain liabilities for breakdown
These attachments hold regardless of who occupies the position. Responsibility travels with the perspective.
How Responsibility Attaches
We can now be precise about the sites to which responsibility adheres.
Roles
Roles carry pre-modulated expectations. Entering a role is entering a field where responsibility is already structured.
Procedures
Procedures allocate responsibility temporally. They specify when obligation begins, when it transfers, and when it is discharged.
Commitments
Commitments bind futures and thereby anchor responsibility. Once a future is stabilised, responsibility accrues to whatever perspective is bound to carry it forward.
Histories of Uptake
Responsibility also sediment through repeated uptake. Patterns of alignment and expectation generate responsibility even in the absence of explicit commitment.
Responsibility Without Moralisation
Detaching responsibility from ownership does not dissolve ethical weight. It relocates it.
Responsibility still:
constrains action
grounds accountability
explains why breakdown matters
What disappears is the assumption that responsibility must be morally anchored in a sovereign subject.
Ethical force remains, but without moralised psychology.
Precedence and Excess
This leads to the central claim of this post:
Responsibility precedes and exceeds any individual bearer.
It precedes individuals because obligation can be in force before any particular person is identified as responsible.
It exceeds individuals because responsibility continues to operate across roles, procedures, and artefacts long after particular persons have moved on.
Implications for Individuation
Once responsibility is understood this way, its role in individuation becomes clear.
Perspectives are not individuated because they own responsibility. They are individuated because responsibility attaches unevenly across positions, binding some futures and not others.
Responsibility differentiates trajectories.
Looking Ahead
If responsibility can exist without ownership, a final question remains.
How do we make sense of individuals and collectives at all?
In the final post of this series, we will articulate the individuation cline — from collective meaning potential to singular perspectival trajectories — showing how individuals and collectives emerge as reciprocal actualisations rather than opposed entities.
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