Meaning as a Dangerous Technology: 6 Responsibility Collapse and Moral Inflation

One of the most corrosive effects of unbounded meaning is what it does to responsibility.

When symbolic systems scale without constraint, responsibility does not merely expand. It distorts.

What emerges is a distinctive pathology: responsibility inflation followed by responsibility collapse.

How meaning inflates responsibility

Meaning enables generalisation. Generalisation enables universal claims. Universal claims generate obligations that are no longer tied to specific capacities, situations, or agents.

Once a problem can be named, it can be moralised. Once moralised, someone must be responsible. Once responsibility is asserted, failure becomes culpable.

This chain does not require malice or fanaticism. It is the ordinary operation of symbolic leverage.

Meaning makes responsibility portable.

From care to rescue

In bounded systems, care is situational. It responds to what is near, actionable, and sustainable.

Meaning breaks this containment. It allows care to be projected far beyond reach. Suffering anywhere becomes obligation everywhere. Awareness substitutes for proximity.

Care quietly mutates into rescue.

Rescue, unlike care, has no natural stopping point. Its scope expands faster than the capacities of any individual or institution.

The collapse

As demands proliferate, something gives.

Organisms cannot sustain universal responsibility. Attention fragments. Motivation erodes. Action stalls.

This failure is then interpreted morally: as apathy, selfishness, or burnout.

But collapse is not a character flaw. It is a structural inevitability.

When symbolic responsibility exceeds enactment capacity, disengagement is not a choice — it is a regulatory response.

Moral inflation

Symbolic systems rarely respond to collapse by contracting. They respond by intensifying.

Language sharpens. Stakes rise. Failure is framed as betrayal. Nuance is treated as evasion.

This inflationary cycle deepens the mismatch. The more morality escalates, the less action remains possible.

Responsibility becomes theatrical rather than operative.

Why this feels like ethics

From the inside, this process feels like moral seriousness. People experience themselves as caring deeply yet acting little, burdened by obligation yet unable to move.

This is not hypocrisy. It is what happens when ethical life is routed through symbolic universality rather than through situated competence.

Ethics detaches from actionability.

A necessary distinction

Responsibility does not attach to everything that can be named.

It attaches to what can be responded to — by whom, here, now.

When meaning ignores this, it does not produce better ethics. It produces collapse masquerading as concern.

To recover responsibility, symbolic systems must be brought back into contact with capacity.

That requires restraint.

And restraint, in symbolic cultures, is easily mistaken for indifference.

The next task is therefore crucial: to show why this argument is not an attack on ethics, care, or meaning itself.