The series so far has traced a recurrent pattern across scientific domains: explanation stabilises, cuts are made, relational excess is suppressed, and resistance emerges. Meaning, agency, contingency, and perspective press back against the forms that claim to contain them.
But what happens when these explanatory cuts leave the domain of science entirely? When their products — predictive power, mechanistic control, optimisation — are applied in the world, the remainders no longer remain theoretical. They begin to generate real consequences.
The Ethical Stakes of Exclusion
When explanation excludes meaning or agency, it does not merely bracket them. It shifts responsibility:
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In neuroscience, neural explanation can predict behaviour, but cannot own the lived experience it manipulates.
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In AI, optimisation can generate performance, but cannot hold accountable the actors or systems affected.
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In economics, models can dictate policy, but cannot account for the human stakes of those policies.
The explanatory cut produces domains of action without the corresponding domains of construal. Where there is action but no perspective, ethical responsibility cannot be assumed; it must be deliberately recognised.
Politics as the Return of Suppressed Relations
The field of constrained possibility does not vanish when models are applied socially or politically. Instead, it returns insistently, as debate, dissent, and resistance:
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Communities resist policies derived from models that neglect context.
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Stakeholders protest decisions that arise from purely mechanistic optimisation.
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Citizens critique AI systems that act without accountability, or that redistribute power without participation.
Intolerance in politics is therefore not a failure of governance. It is the mirror of intolerance built into the explanatory cut itself.
Responsibility Without Sovereignty
When explanation is applied in the world, responsibility cannot be delegated to the system, model, or algorithm. It cannot be absorbed by predictive power or mechanistic insight.
Responsibility must arise relationally, acknowledging what has been excluded by the explanatory cut:
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Recognising what perspective has been bracketed.
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Accounting for relational consequences that cannot be formalised.
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Treating the field of possibility as morally significant, even when it cannot be fully contained.
In other words, ethics is always imposed retroactively upon the remainder of explanation.
The Structural Signal
Across science, technology, and policy, the same structural signal repeats:
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A cut stabilises explanation.
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Remainders of meaning, agency, and perspective are suppressed.
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Resistance and intolerance emerge.
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When applied in the world, these suppressed relations demand attention as ethical and political exigencies.
Intolerance is not accidental. It is diagnostic. Where explanation has cut too sharply, responsibility and resistance arise naturally.
Living With the Intolerable Cut
The lesson is not that science, AI, or policy must do better in some abstract sense. Nor is it that ethics must bend to explanation.
It is that the world always exceeds explanation, and that responsibility arises precisely at those points of excess.
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Where meaning has been bracketed, attention must be restored.
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Where agency has been optimised away, accountability must be asserted.
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Where contingency has been neglected, judgment must remain open.
The explanatory cut creates power. That power cannot escape the relational field from which it was drawn.
Conclusion: Attention as Ethics
The work of ethics and politics, in a world shaped by powerful explanatory systems, is not to correct error, but to read the remainder.
Attention, care, and reflexive awareness become the instruments of responsibility. They are the practices that make possible a coexistence with explanation’s exclusions — and with the intolerances those exclusions inevitably generate.
Where science, technology, or policy succeeds, the relational remainder speaks. The task of the responsible actor is to listen, and to act in the field that explanation cannot contain.
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