What becomes possible when we stop locating responsibility in a central agent or inner core.
1. The default assumption
Ethical discourse, law, and everyday morality presuppose that responsibility requires an agent with intention, awareness, and control. When outcomes go wrong, the first questions are usually:
Who is responsible?
Did they know what they were doing?
Could they have acted differently?
This framework is so entrenched that we rarely notice it. It underlies blame, praise, liability, and credit.
Yet, across organisations, social systems, and even personal interactions, this model often fails to explain the outcomes we observe.
2. Agency as a representational hangover
Locating responsibility in a discrete agent is a consequence of a representational ontology: agents are treated as independent centres, intentions as internal representations, and actions as outputs of plans.
From this perspective, moral evaluation becomes a matter of comparing internal representations to external events. Misalignment is failure; alignment is virtue.
But this view obscures how responsibility actually functions in practice. Systems, teams, and networks often achieve accountability and responsiveness without any single agent holding full control or awareness.
3. Responsibility as relational pattern
On a relational ontology, responsibility is distributed and emergent. It arises from patterns of interaction, mutual sensitivity, and shared constraints.
Three features illustrate this:
Distributed awareness: no one individual knows everything, but awareness emerges through relational signalling.
Constraint responsiveness: actions are constrained by the needs, expectations, and feedback of others.
Iterative adjustment: responsibility is enacted through continuous adaptation, not one-time decisions.
These features suffice to produce accountable, responsive behaviour even when no single agent is in control.
4. Why the traditional model misleads
Blaming or crediting individuals often obscures the real dynamics. Consider:
Workplace failures: often attributed to managerial oversight, but deeper analysis reveals misalignments in communication, resources, and incentives.
Collaborative projects: success rarely hinges on a single person; it emerges from repeated coordination and relational sensitivity.
Legal responsibility: courts construct narratives around individuals, but the causal reality is distributed across actions, context, and consequences.
The traditional model makes responsibility appear as a discrete possession rather than a relational achievement.
5. Examples in practice
Software development: Bugs are rarely the fault of one programmer. They arise from interactions among code, tools, and multiple developers. Accountability is maintained through code review, automated tests, and collaborative protocols.
Healthcare: Patient outcomes depend on doctors, nurses, protocols, and systems. Responsibility is distributed across these interactions rather than located in a single practitioner.
Traffic systems: Accidents are seldom the fault of a single driver. Responsibility is emergent from rules, signals, vehicle interactions, and shared expectations.
In all cases, responsibility works without a single controlling agent.
6. Ethical implication
This perspective does not absolve anyone of action. On the contrary, it increases ethical demand by showing that outcomes are co‑individuated. Accountability is a property of patterns and relationships, not inner cores.
We can intervene, adjust, and repair systems without ever imagining that responsibility resides in a detached central mind. Ethics becomes a matter of relational calibration rather than internal judgement.
7. What becomes possible
Reframing responsibility allows us to:
Analyse failures and successes with precision, seeing relational sources of breakdown
Design institutions and practices that distribute responsibility appropriately
Collaborate effectively without expecting perfect central oversight
Understand moral demand as embedded in action and interaction rather than abstracted to inner agents
Responsibility is not lost when agency is de-emphasised; it is redistributed and rendered more generative.
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