Responsibility · Ethics · Reflexivity
We are not at the centre of the Universe, and nothing indicates that reflexivity is its destination. On the cosmic scale, our appearance seems to answer no identifiable project. Yet in at least one known region of the cosmos, material processes have brought forth structures able to foresee part of their effects, to compare them with values and to modify some of their conditions.
This capacity was not given to us. It emerged. And its emergence does not automatically produce an obligation. That is where responsibility begins — and where it remains a question.
Cumulative memory
With nervous systems and learning, individual experience can modify future behaviour. In human beings, language, tools, narratives, writing and institutions extend that capacity beyond the individual and beyond a single life. Each generation inherits a cumulative memory that it did not entirely create but that it can extend, correct or transmit in distorted form.
This cumulative memory does not only serve to preserve. It also makes it possible to reconstruct what no longer is, and to project consequences into a future we do not yet inhabit.
Reflexivity opens a normative possibility, but it does not realise it on its own. Between the capacity to foresee and the obligation to answer lies a commitment of value. Thermodynamics does not contain that requirement. Biology does not tell us what we must do. Responsibility is not given to us by nature.
The asymmetry of power
This responsibility cannot be attributed uniformly. The word « we » risks masking considerable differences of power, contribution and exposure to risk. An inhabitant exposed to the effects of industrial activities they do not control does not occupy the same position as an executive able to steer investments.
The principle that responsibility increases with power is not a law discovered in the order of the world. It follows from the idea that a greater power implies a greater capacity to produce or to avoid certain effects — and therefore a proportionally wider responsibility.
Engineers of bifurcations
We do not inhabit a world whose trajectories are fixed. We inhabit a world where bifurcations are possible, where certain decisions close some possibilities and open others. To be accountable for part of the possible is to recognise that our acts take part in selecting those trajectories.
This is neither a consolation nor a cosmic burden. It is simply what the capacity to foresee, to choose and to transmit implies — in a world that guarantees nothing in advance.
SYNTHESIS
Responsibility emerges where reflexivity (the capacity to foresee and evaluate one's effects), power (the capacity to modify trajectories) and transmission (the inscription of effects in a shared future) intersect. It follows from no natural law. It is born of a commitment that is not logically obligatory but that becomes possible as soon as those three conditions are met.