Identity emerges where responsibility seeks an address.
When harm persists, when moral remainder cannot be dissolved by principle or displaced by justification, ethics looks for a bearer. Politics names a decision. Ethics names a cost. Identity names who it belongs to.
This is not an accident of social psychology.
It is a structural move.
Identity as Moral Containment
Identity stabilises moral space by fixing attribution:
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who is responsible,
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who is innocent,
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who is victim,
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who is threat.
Once located, responsibility becomes manageable.
The Identity Cut
Identity is produced by a cut that separates:
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inside from outside,
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same from other,
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us from them,
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agent from background.
Non-identity — the refusal or failure to fit cleanly — destabilises this allocation.
And so it is resisted.
Intolerance of Non-Identity
Non-identity appears when:
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individuals occupy multiple moral positions at once,
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victims are also agents,
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beneficiaries are also harmed,
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culpability is distributed and entangled.
Such positions are ethically explosive.
They threaten the fantasy that responsibility can be cleanly assigned.
Intolerance emerges as a demand for coherence:
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pick a side,
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declare a position,
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assume a role,
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become legible.
The Violence of Fixation
When identity hardens under moral pressure, complexity collapses:
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histories flatten into labels,
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relations reduce to categories,
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persons become cases.
This is not merely conceptual violence.
It has material consequences.
Fixation permits punishment, exclusion, erasure — all in the name of moral clarity.
Identity and Innocence
Much identity discourse is driven by a desire for innocence:
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to stand outside harm,
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to avoid complicity,
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to secure moral ground.
But innocence is not a position in relational systems.
It is an effect of selective accounting.
Non-identity exposes this — and is therefore intolerable.
Relational Selves
A relational account of identity begins elsewhere.
It treats identity not as essence or possession, but as:
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a temporary stabilisation of relations,
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a site where histories converge,
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a locus of accountability that is always partial.
Such an account cannot promise moral purity.
It can only promise responsiveness.
Enduring the Unstable Self
Ethical life in relational systems requires the capacity to endure:
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being implicated without being identical to harm,
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bearing responsibility without total blame,
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acting without final self-justification.
This is psychologically difficult.
Which is why identity is so often asked to do more than it can.
Closing
Identity becomes dangerous when it is asked to resolve what ethics cannot.
The intolerance of non-identity marks the point where moral complexity threatens the stability of the self.
To read identity relationally is not to abolish it, but to refuse its overwork — to let identity remain provisional, accountable, and open to revision.
Only then can responsibility move without hardening into exclusion.
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