Responsibility is usually treated as a moral property of individuals: a capacity to choose, to intend, to be accountable. Within a relational ontology, this framing is not merely inadequate; it is misplaced. Responsibility does not originate in agents. It arises in systems that evolve, and it names a stance toward that evolution.
Responsibility is care for the conditions under which intelligibility continues.
1. Why Responsibility Cannot Be Located in the Individual
If meaning is relational and normativity emerges from coordination, then responsibility cannot be a private attribute. No individual controls the field of possibility within which their actions acquire sense. Individuals act within cuts they did not make, constraints they did not design, and histories they did not author.
This does not absolve agents; it relocates accountability. Responsibility concerns how one participates in maintaining, modifying, or destabilising shared fields of coordination — not whether one conforms to an abstract rule.
2. Responsibility as Attunement to Systemic Effects
In evolving systems, actions do not have fixed meanings or outcomes. Their significance depends on how they reshape the relational field itself. Responsible action, therefore, is not rule-following but attunement:
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to how constraints are sedimenting,
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to which possibilities are being amplified or foreclosed,
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to where coordination is becoming brittle.
This attunement is necessarily local and provisional. Responsibility has no final formula.
3. The Ethics of Non-Closure
One of the deepest ethical failures in complex systems is premature closure: treating a particular configuration of cuts as final, natural, or unquestionable. Closure freezes possibility and disguises contingency as necessity.
Responsibility consists in keeping systems open enough to evolve — not by abolishing constraints, but by preserving their revisability. This is not indecision; it is disciplined restraint in the face of power.
4. Collective Responsibility and Asymmetric Power
Because access to cuts is uneven, responsibility is distributed asymmetrically. Those who shape institutions, curricula, policies, and discourses bear greater responsibility, not because they are morally superior, but because their actions have system-level effects.
To deny this asymmetry is itself irresponsible. Responsibility increases with the capacity to stabilise or destabilise fields of intelligibility.
5. Responsibility Without Guarantees
Relational responsibility offers no guarantees of correctness. Systems can evolve badly despite good intentions and careful attunement. Responsibility is not a promise of success; it is a commitment to ongoing responsiveness.
What matters is not purity of motive or certainty of outcome, but willingness to:
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notice breakdowns,
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revise cuts,
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and remain answerable to the system’s evolution.
Conclusion
Responsibility, understood relationally, is not a burden placed on isolated subjects. It is the ongoing work of sustaining the conditions under which meaning, coordination, and possibility can continue to evolve.
We are responsible not for systems, but within them — and to them.
That is the ethical demand of a world without foundations: not certainty, but care for what is still becoming.
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