Intelligibility, Revisability, and Responsibility: 2 Why Ethical Failure Is Usually a Failure of Readiness or Intelligibility

Ethical failure is almost always explained too quickly.

Someone acted wrongly.

Someone should have known better.

Someone failed to live up to a norm.

These explanations feel obvious because moral language is fast. It allocates cause, distributes blame, and stabilises judgment in a single move. But precisely because it is fast, it routinely obscures what actually failed.

From a relational perspective, ethical failure is rarely a matter of bad values or corrupt intentions. It is far more often a failure of coordination conditions — a mismatch between what is ready to happen and what the system can recognise, process, or revise for.

Ethics does not fail because people are immoral.

It fails because systems cannot align readiness and intelligibility.

---

Moral Explanation and the Illusion of Cause

Moral explanation thrives where revisability is already under pressure.

When coordination begins to strain, systems reach for moral language because it:

• simplifies causal attribution

• compresses complexity

• creates immediate norm closure

This produces the feeling of explanation without producing repair.

Moral explanation answers the question “Who is at fault?”

Ethical diagnosis must answer the question “What could not coordinate?”

The two are not equivalent — and confusing them accelerates breakdown.

---

Failure Mode I: Readiness Without Uptake

In the first and most common form of ethical failure, readiness is present but cannot be taken up.

Here, individuals or sub-systems possess:

• the inclination to act differently

• the ability to do so

But the surrounding field lacks the intelligibility to register, legitimise, or coordinate with that readiness.

This is where ethical innovation appears as deviance.

Early warnings are dismissed.

Care practices look inefficient.

Non-normative responses seem irresponsible.

What later becomes obvious was once unintelligible — not because it was wrong, but because the system was not yet able to see it as a viable move.

Ethical judgment misfires here by treating misalignment as misconduct.

The system cannot say: “We were not ready to learn.”

So it says: “You acted wrongly.”

---

Failure Mode II: Intelligibility Without Readiness

The second failure mode reverses the asymmetry.

Here, the system can perfectly recognise what would count as ethical action. The norms are clear. The discourse is fluent. The standards are endlessly articulated.

But readiness is absent:

• no inclination to act

• no capacity to follow through

• no structural ability to coordinate change

This produces a familiar landscape:

• symbolic compliance

• moral signalling

• performative ethics

Ethical language proliferates precisely because it substitutes for action.

In these cases, morality does not fail by being wrong — it fails by becoming decorative. The system knows what should be done but cannot mobilise the conditions to do it.

Ethics becomes commentary rather than coordination.

---

Failure Mode III: Collapsed Revisability Disguised as Moral Certainty

The most dangerous failure occurs when neither readiness nor intelligibility can be repaired.

At this point, systems harden. Norms cease to function as guides and become boundaries. Ethical certainty replaces ethical negotiation.

This is where moral language feels strongest.

Not because the system is more ethical —

but because revisability has failed.

From the inside, collapsed revisability feels like conviction, clarity, righteousness. From the outside, it appears as rigidity, exclusion, and escalating conflict.

Moral certainty is often what a system feels like when it can no longer learn.

---

Ethical Repair Is Not Moral Improvement

Once ethical failure is understood relationally, repair looks very different.

Ethical repair does not mean:

• persuading people to adopt better values

• intensifying moral commitment

• sharpening normative language

It means:

• increasing readiness

• expanding intelligibility

• restoring revisability

Repair happens when systems regain the capacity to:

• recognise emerging possibilities

• coordinate with partial or premature readiness

• remain negotiable under pressure

This preserves responsibility without moralisation.

Responsibility becomes situated contribution to field repair, not purity of stance or intention.

---

Why This Reframing Matters

At small scales, moral explanation can sometimes function as a rough heuristic. At institutional, cultural, and planetary scales, it becomes actively harmful.

As scale increases:

• intention diffuses

• control fragments

• moralisation accelerates lock-in

What remains viable is not moral judgment, but coordination diagnostics.

Ethics, at scale, is not about being right.

It is about keeping systems capable of learning.

Ethical failure, then, is not a collapse of virtue —

it is a collapse of future negotiability.

And ethical responsibility begins precisely where systems recover the ability to revise themselves.