If ethics is not about values, and if agency does not depend on autonomy, then responsibility must be reconsidered from the ground up.
What falls away first is blame.
Responsibility is not, in its primary sense, a judgement about fault. It is not an attribution of moral failure. It is not a verdict rendered after the fact.
Responsibility names something more basic: exposure to the consequences of participation.
The blame reflex
Modern ethical discourse is saturated with blame. When harm occurs, the immediate question is: Who is responsible? — where “responsible” is tacitly understood to mean who deserves reproach or sanction.
This reflex is so entrenched that responsibility and blame are often treated as synonymous. But this identification is neither necessary nor helpful.
Conflating the two obscures both.
Exposure as the ground of responsibility
To be responsible is to be exposed — not emotionally, but structurally.
An agent is responsible insofar as:
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their participation contributes to a system of coordination,
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that contribution shapes the space of possible continuation,
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and the consequences of that shaping are not fully avoidable by others.
Responsibility arises before evaluation. It arises simply because participation has effects.
Why blame is secondary
Blame enters only later, and for specific reasons.
Blame:
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compresses complex causal fields into person-centred narratives,
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creates focal points for sanction and deterrence,
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stabilises social expectations through moral signalling.
These functions can be socially effective. But they are not ethically foundational.
Blame simplifies responsibility by moralising it. In doing so, it often forecloses the very repair that responsibility calls for.
Responsibility without innocence or guilt
Once responsibility is understood as exposure, familiar moral categories lose their grip.
Ethical clarity improves when these distinctions are kept separate.
Answerability, not culpability
A more precise term for responsibility, in this framework, is answerability.
To be answerable is to be:
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situated within a field of relations,
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unable to disavow one’s contribution to its dynamics,
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called upon to respond when breakdown occurs.
The ethical question becomes not:
Who should be blamed?
but:
Who is positioned to participate in repair?
Repair as the ethical core
Once blame is removed from the centre of ethics, repair comes into focus.
Repair is the attempt to re-stabilise relational viability under altered conditions.
Responsibility is meaningful only where repair is possible — even if the repair is partial, asymmetrical, or painful.
Where repair is impossible, ethics does not escalate into judgement. It reaches its limit.
Why this matters
Treating responsibility as blame produces brittle ethics:
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defensive,
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moralising,
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prone to escalation and exclusion.
Treating responsibility as exposure produces resilient ethics:
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attentive to structure,
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proportionate to capacity,
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oriented toward sustaining possibility rather than assigning fault.
Looking ahead
If responsibility is exposure rather than blame, then the ethical skill most required is not judgement, but care — understood not as sentiment, but as structural sensitivity to vulnerability and constraint.
The next post will examine care in exactly this way: not as moral virtue, but as an ethical capacity that emerges wherever responsibility is taken seriously.
That is where ethics becomes quietly demanding.
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