The preceding posts have shown how events and meanings emerge through construal: perspectival cuts that actualise structured potential under constraint. What remains is a question that cannot be postponed once construal is taken seriously:
If there are no foundations beneath actualisation, where does responsibility reside?
This post argues that responsibility does not require metaphysical ground floors. It arises within the act of actualisation itself.
Why Foundations Fail
Foundational ethics promises security: rules grounded in nature, reason, God, or Reality itself. Yet each attempt to secure responsibility by appeal to foundations collapses under scrutiny. Foundations either:
Reduce responsibility to obedience (follow the rule), or
Displace responsibility upward (the foundation decides, not us).
In both cases, agency evaporates. Responsibility is outsourced to what supposedly already is.
Relational ontology makes a quieter but more demanding claim: there is no responsibility beneath actualisation, only responsibility in actualisation.
Actualisation as Commitment
Every actualisation is a commitment. To select one possibility rather than another is to bind oneself to the consequences of that selection within a constrained field.
This is not moralism. It is structural.
To measure is to commit to an experimental cut.
To speak is to commit to a semantic construal.
To act is to commit to a social coordination.
Responsibility does not arise from intention alone, nor from outcomes alone, but from the acknowledgement that one has made a cut that could have been otherwise.
Constraint Is Not Excuse
A common evasion of responsibility appeals to constraint:
“I had no choice.”
Relational ontology rejects this move. Constraints enable intelligible action; they do not eliminate agency. Without constraint, there is no action at all—only noise.
Responsibility lies precisely in how one acts within constraint:
Which distinctions were drawn?
Which alternatives were foreclosed?
Which possibilities were rendered invisible?
To deny responsibility because one was constrained is to misunderstand what constraint does.
Responsibility Without Moral Absolutes
This account of responsibility does not rely on universal moral laws or absolute values. Nor does it collapse into relativism.
Instead, responsibility is situated:
Local to the system of constraints
Indexed to the available possibilities
Articulated through the act of construal itself
This is why responsibility cannot be settled in advance. It must be taken, not derived.
The Quantum Lesson Revisited
Quantum mechanics taught us—unwillingly—that outcomes are not simply revealed but produced through experimental arrangements. Yet physicists often recoil from the ethical implication of this fact, retreating to slogans about “just doing physics.”
What relational ontology shows is that there is no ethically neutral actualisation.
To refuse responsibility for the cut is itself a cut—one that attempts to erase its own trace.
Responsibility as Ontological Practice
Responsibility, then, is not a rulebook but a discipline:
Attend to the constraints you inherit.
Acknowledge the possibilities you exclude.
Own the cuts you enact.
This discipline applies across domains: scientific, biological, social, symbolic. Wherever something becomes actual rather than merely possible, responsibility has already entered the scene.
Beyond Innocence
The fantasy of foundational ethics is a fantasy of innocence: that one could act while remaining untouched by the consequences of acting. Relational ontology denies us this comfort.
But it offers something better in its place: lucidity.
The next post will explore how this ethic of actualisation reshapes our understanding of knowledge itself—what it means to know without foundations, and to think without pretending to stand nowhere.
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