With breakdown and correctness now in view, the remaining question is unavoidable:
If normativity is not moral, not representational, and not rule-based, why does it sometimes feel so forceful?
Why does an “ought” not merely constrain, but press?
This post answers that question by reframing obligation — not as command or duty, but as relational pressure generated within systems of coordination.
Obligation without authority
In ordinary discourse, obligation is usually understood in juridical terms. To be obligated is to be bound by a law, a rule, or an authority capable of sanction. On this view, obligation enters only once institutions, norms, or moral systems are in place.
But this view cannot explain the most basic forms of obligation we experience:
-
the felt need to finish a sentence once begun,
-
the pull to respond when addressed,
-
the pressure to stabilise a faltering interaction,
-
the demand to repair a breakdown one has participated in producing.
No authority is issuing commands here. And yet the pressure is real.
Participation generates pressure
Obligation arises not from rules, but from participation in relational systems.
Once a system of coordination is underway, each act contributes to the viability of future acts — not only one’s own, but those of others who are co-participating. This creates asymmetries of dependence.
To participate is to make oneself answerable to the continuation of the system one is helping to actualise.
Obligation is simply the experiential name for that answerability.
Why obligation intensifies with relation
Not all relational pressures are equal.
Obligation intensifies when:
-
coordination becomes mutual rather than unilateral,
-
breakdown threatens others’ capacity to continue,
-
one’s actions disproportionately shape the available futures of the system.
This is why obligation is strongest in domains like conversation, collaboration, care, and social life more broadly. These are not domains of increased moralisation, but of increased interdependence.
The more tightly coupled the system, the more acute the pressure.
No appeal to values required
It is tempting to explain obligation by appeal to values: respect, fairness, responsibility. But once again, such explanations are secondary.
The pressure to respond in a conversation is felt before one evaluates whether politeness is a value. The demand to repair a misstep is experienced before any moral judgement is made.
Values articulate obligations; they do not generate them.
Obligation precedes evaluation because it is grounded in structural participation, not in moral endorsement.
Obligation as directional constraint
We can now be precise.
Obligation is not the demand to act in a particular way. It is the pressure to act in some way that preserves or repairs relational viability.
This is why obligation constrains without specifying. It does not dictate what must be done; it demands that something be done that re-aligns the system.
Different repairs can satisfy the same obligation. Different responses can relieve the same pressure.
Obligation is directional, not prescriptive.
From pressure to ethics
At this point, the bridge to ethics becomes visible.
Ethical systems do not invent obligation. They formalise, stabilise, and sometimes over-specify it. They translate relational pressure into rules, duties, and values that can be taught, enforced, and debated.
But those systems remain intelligible only because obligation already operates at a more basic level.
Looking ahead
With obligation now understood as relational pressure, the final post of this series can address the remaining concern:
If normativity is this pervasive, how does it avoid collapsing into determinism or coercion?
The answer lies in freedom — not as absence of constraint, but as navigation within constraint.
The final post will examine freedom, responsibility, and agency as emergent properties of constrained participation, rather than as metaphysical primitives.
No comments:
Post a Comment