The Structure of Accountability and the Limits of Moral Attribution
Responsibility is not an objective fact, but a product of moral interpretation. At this point, a natural line of inquiry follows. Who possesses the standing to speak of responsibility, and by what terms is that responsibility defined? However, we have already rejected the premise that responsibility exists as an objective fact. If responsibility is not something simply discovered in the world, then it cannot be naturally anchored to any single individual. Responsibility must be interpreted, attributed, and situated within context. Attributing responsibility to a specific individual therefore often operates not as an explanation, but as a form of displacement. Such attribution displaces attention from institutions, environments, power relations, and asymmetries of information.
This is not a claim that responsibility vanishes, nor that it can no longer be attributed. Structural responsibility holds that even those who did not act directly cannot fully absolve themselves if they were situated within the systems that rendered those outcomes possible. At this juncture, the phrase “we all share responsibility” often surfaces. Ordinarily, this formulation is dangerous. It risks collapsing into the claim that if everyone is marginally at fault, then no one is meaningfully accountable. But that is not what is being argued here. Not everyone is a perpetrator. Not everyone is a victim. Etymologically, responsibility derives from the notion of response. To bear responsibility is not, in the first instance, to accept punishment, but to refuse silence in the presence of a question.
It exerts ethical force only when it is oriented not toward punishment, but toward the recovery of meaning. Responsibility does not arise naturally. Yet this does not imply that it may be defined arbitrarily. The manner in which responsibility is defined is itself a normative and ethical question. Responsibility does not fail only when it is denied, but when it is rendered psychologically uninhabitable. This condition has been examined most clearly in the work of social psychologists John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, whose experimental studies on bystander intervention focused on how individuals interpret responsibility in emergency situations.
Their research observed that as the number of perceived potential responders increased, the likelihood that any single individual would intervene reliably decreased. Responsibility was not rejected by participants; rather, it was cognitively displaced, interpreted as equally shared and therefore urgently borne by none. What emerged was not refusal, but suspended response, a state in which moral obligation remained conceptually acknowledged yet practically uninhabited.¹This pattern was later confirmed in a meta-analytic review by Fischer et al., which found that the diffusion of responsibility reliably reduced intervention across a wide range of experimental and real-world emergency contexts.¹
A complementary dynamic appears in the work of psychologist Albert Bandura, whose account of moral disengagement examines how individuals respond to overwhelming moral demand. Bandura describes how excessive or totalizing responsibility often provokes defensive strategies such as distancing, rationalization, or withdrawal. This account aligns with Schwartz’s norm activation theory, which suggests that when moral obligations are perceived as overwhelming or diffuse, individuals are less likely to translate ethical awareness into action.² Under contemporary global regulatory regimes, responsibility is not only diffused, but increasingly displaced.
Environmental governance, particularly in the regulation of carbon emissions, offers a clear illustration of this dynamic. As international frameworks and national policies intensify environmental standards within developed economies, responsibility for emission reduction becomes formally articulated yet structurally mobile. Similar patterns of responsibility displacement have been identified at the institutional level. Bovens’ analysis of accountability in complex governance systems shows that as responsibility is distributed across multiple actors, effective response becomes harder to locate and enforce, even when formal responsibility is clearly articulated.³
Empirical research on carbon leakage suggests that this mobility can be observed in measurable terms. Analyses drawing on OECD carbon-pricing data indicate that emissions reductions achieved within regulated jurisdictions are partially offset by increases elsewhere through international trade and production relocation. Back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that carbon leakage through trade has offset roughly thirteen percent of domestic emission reductions in industry sectors facing higher carbon costs, illustrating how regulatory gains can be materially diluted rather than globally resolved.¹
What matters here is not the precise magnitude of leakage, but the structural implication it reveals: responsibility, once attached to jurisdiction-bound compliance, becomes capable of relocation rather than resolution. Similar assessments by international policy bodies note that, in some sectors, a substantial share of emissions reductions achieved through domestic regulation is counterbalanced by increased emissions in non-regulated regions, leaving net global reductions significantly smaller than projected.
This pattern does not arise because regulatory institutions have acted in bad faith, nor because environmental law has been poorly designed. The intent here is not to indict regulatory ambition, but to expose a structural limit: when responsibility is defined primarily through compliance, it invites strategic adaptation rather than sustained response. When responsibility is imposed through abstract standards and jurisdiction-bound compliance, pathways for circumvention inevitably emerge. Production relocates, supply chains reconfigure, and environmental costs are redistributed rather than eliminated.
Such dynamics reveal a structural vulnerability inherent to collective responsibility under conditions of global interdependence. The problem is not that responsibility disappears, but that it becomes transferable. In a world increasingly organized around shared obligations and diffuse authority, responsibility risks transforming from an ethical demand into a movable burden—something that can be relocated, deferred, or optimized against rather than inhabited as a call to response.
Collectively, these observations indicate that responsibility retains ethical force only insofar as it remains inhabitable as a mode of response. Conceived in this way, responsibility resists two familiar failures. It avoids the excess that overwhelms individuals into silence by refusing total moral saturation. At the same time, it avoids the absence that licenses indifference by rejecting abstraction as absolution. Directional responsibility does not demand comprehensive moral control, nor does it permit disengagement through diffusion. It operates instead as a sustained responsiveness to the conditions one inhabits.
The urgency of this reconfiguration lies in its timing. As global challenges increasingly exceed the capacity of any single actor to resolve them, responsibility will continue to be distributed rather than consolidated. Reports on global governance and public trust consistently indicate a widening gap between responsibility articulated at the institutional level and perceived accountability at the level of response, with participation and compliance declining as responsibility becomes more diffuse. Across domains ranging from climate commitments to public health coordination, participation and compliance have shown signs of erosion as responsibility is increasingly framed in abstract and collective terms.
The question facing 2026 is not whether responsibility should be shared, but whether it can be articulated in forms that still permit response. Without such forms, responsibility risks becoming rhetorically ubiquitous and practically inert. Under conditions of global diffusion and moral saturation, responsibility can no longer function as a final answer. It must instead be approached as a directional practice, one that preserves the possibility of response amid structural complexity.
This failure of inhabitable responsibility is not an incidental byproduct of complexity. It is increasingly a structural feature of contemporary governance. As authority fragments and decision-making diffuses across states, institutions, platforms, and networks, responsibility is systematically externalized without ever being relinquished. Moral language proliferates precisely as accountability thins. The result is a paradoxical condition in which responsibility is omnipresent in rhetoric yet absent in practice. In global public health, this pattern has been laid bare by pandemic preparedness and response. International frameworks routinely emphasize shared responsibility for prevention, surveillance, and coordination.
Yet when systemic failures occur, responsibility dissolves into jurisdictional ambiguity, with states deferring to global institutions, institutions deferring to member states, and both invoking structural constraints as justification for inaction. Responsibility is acknowledged everywhere and borne nowhere. Similar dynamics govern digital governance, where technology companies publicly affirm responsibility for misinformation, surveillance, or algorithmic harm while distributing causal agency across users, automated systems, and opaque technical processes. Accountability becomes procedural rather than substantive, oriented toward compliance audits and policy statements rather than corrective response.
What unites these cases is not a lack of moral concern, but a surplus of abstract responsibility. When responsibility is articulated at scales too large to inhabit, it ceases to guide action and instead becomes a resource for strategic deflection. Actors learn not how to respond responsibly, but how to remain formally compliant while functionally unaccountable. Under such conditions, responsibility no longer constrains power; it stabilizes it. This is why the problem confronting 2026 is not simply one of better enforcement or clearer attribution. It is a problem of moral architecture. If responsibility continues to be defined as a comprehensive obligation imposed from above, it will continue to generate disengagement, displacement, and adaptive avoidance. A directional conception of responsibility does not eliminate structural injustice, but it resists the moral anesthetic produced by totalizing demand. It restores responsibility as a lived orientation toward response rather than a symbolic burden assigned after the fact.
By: Ryan Kim
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