We are accountable for part of the possible

We are accountable for part of the possible

When reflexivity makes responsibility possible

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. Stars form and disappear, galaxies evolve, matter is transformed according to regularities that appear neither to await our presence nor necessarily to converge upon it. Yet in at least one known region of the cosmos, material processes have brought forth structures capable of preserving traces of their history, of reconstructing part of it, of anticipating certain consequences and of intervening in the conditions they will transmit.

This history must not be told as a necessary march leading from matter to life, from life to consciousness, and then from consciousness to responsibility. Nothing allows us to assert that complexity had to become reflexive, that biological memory had to lead to culture, or that anticipation had to give rise to a moral requirement. Each of these transitions depends on a contingent history. Other paths could have been taken, other forms of organisation could have appeared, and nothing guarantees that human reflexivity constitutes a summit or a culmination.

Life itself does not « fight » entropy. Organisms are open systems that use flows of matter and energy to maintain their organisation temporarily, to repair certain structures and to reproduce. They produce order locally while taking part in the global increase of entropy. Biological complexity is therefore not an exception to physical laws. It represents one of the forms matter can take when it exploits energy gradients to maintain an organisation far from equilibrium.

This clarification modifies our place in the real. We are not creatures external to the world, come to resist its indifference, but a local form of its organisation. The genome is one of the expressions of this continuity. It does not contain the « lessons of the past » like a book that had recorded the history of life. It is a transformed memory, continually reworked by mutation, recombination, selection, drift and interactions with the environment. The past is neither narrated nor faithfully preserved there. It persists there in the form of structures that have passed through a history of constraints.

With nervous systems and learning, individual experience can modify future behaviour. In humans, language, tools, narratives, writing and institutions extend this transformation. Memory ceases to be confined within organisms. It is inscribed in objects, archives, libraries, scientific instruments, infrastructures and networks. A discovery can outlive the person who produced it, and a generation can begin its learning from knowledge it did not have to rebuild entirely.

This cumulative memory does not serve only to preserve. It also makes it possible to reconstruct what no longer is. From fossils, genomes, geological strata, ruins or ancient radiation, we attempt to understand events no human being witnessed. These reconstructions remain partial. A trace is never the past itself, but what survives of it after transformation. Between the vanished event and the model we produce of it lie our instruments, our methods, our hypotheses and the limits of our observation. Despite this incompleteness, a new possibility appears. Part of the real becomes capable of questioning the conditions that preceded its existence and of turning a memory of the past into anticipation.

It would be excessive to claim that the Universe becomes conscious of itself. Nothing warrants speaking of a cosmic consciousness. We can only note that certain structures issuing from its history have become capable of producing partial representations of it. These representations are limited, revisable and sometimes mistaken. They offer no total mastery of the real, but they make it possible to identify certain risks, to compare several trajectories and to understand that a present action can modify the conditions of a future that will not belong to us.

It is at this level that responsibility becomes possible, without following automatically from reflexivity. Understanding the consequences of an action does not necessarily lead to taking them on. A society can know the delayed effects of its choices and continue to produce them. An actor can acknowledge that they impose risks on others and decide nonetheless that their immediate interests take priority. History shows that knowledge, anticipation and power can coexist with exploitation, domination and destruction.

Reflexivity therefore 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. It consists in recognising that the vulnerability of others counts, that power does not suffice to legitimate its own effects, and that the inability to speak, to vote, to resist or to reciprocate does not make a being morally negligible.

Thermodynamics does not contain this requirement. Biology does not tell us what we ought to do. No natural fact suffices to produce a moral obligation. Responsibility is not imposed on us by a cosmic law. It rests on a normative choice that can be defended without being demonstrable as a physical law. That choice refuses to let power become its own principle of legitimacy. It affirms that an actor able to impose the consequences of their decisions durably must be able to answer for them before those who bear them or, when those are absent or deprived of a voice, before forms of representation that remain themselves contestable.

This starting point provides no ultimate foundation. It will never logically constrain someone who considers that force, interest or the capacity to impose suffices to justify a decision. It does, however, make explicit what that position implies. To refuse all obligation toward those affected amounts to accepting that power can be at once the origin of a decision, the judge of its legitimacy and the arbiter of its consequences. The requirement of non-domination appears here as an assumed moral choice rather than as a truth concealed within nature.

The principle according to which responsibility increases with power must be understood within this framework. It is not a law discovered in the order of the world. It follows from the idea that a power must answer for what it makes possible or impossible. The more an actor contributes to a transformation, holds information about its effects and possesses the means to prevent, reduce or repair them, the greater their obligation to justify becomes. This responsibility does not rest on reciprocity. Future generations, non-humans and beings deprived of power cannot always give back what they receive, nor answer those who act upon their conditions of existence. Their vulnerability calls rather for an equal consideration of their interests and for care directed at the conditions on which their continuity, their regeneration and their capacity to evolve depend.

This responsibility cannot, however, be attributed uniformly to humanity. The word « we » risks masking considerable differences of power, of contribution and of exposure to risk. All humans take part in technical, economic and ecological systems, but not all have the same capacity to orient them. Not all close off the same possibilities and not all can protect themselves with the same ease against the consequences of those closures.

An inhabitant exposed to the effects of industrial activities they do not control does not occupy the same position as an executive able to direct investments, modify production chains or influence political decisions. A community displaced by an infrastructure project does not have the same power as the institution that defines the criteria by which that displacement will be judged acceptable. The « we » of responsibility must therefore remain differentiated. It designates a humanity that has become collectively capable of profoundly modifying the conditions of the living, but that capacity is unequally distributed. A collective responsibility that does not distinguish levels of power risks turning a political asymmetry into general guilt and diluting the responsibility of those who actually hold the means to decide.

This asymmetry appears with particular force in the technosphere. Thanks to cultural transmission, each generation inherits tools, knowledge and institutions it did not create alone. Power accumulates in infrastructures, energy networks, industrial systems, cities, digital technologies and political organisations. These systems extend our capacities, but they also create dependencies. Old choices become present constraints, and technical or economic structures orient behaviour well beyond the intentions of those who designed them.

We like to picture ourselves as the architects of our future. The image presupposes a plan, a common intention and a capacity for control. It becomes less credible as the systems we build gain in complexity. No individual, no company and no government masters the whole set of interactions that organise the technosphere. We have capacities of orientation, but not absolute control.

This absence of mastery does not mean that power disappears. It means that it is distributed among institutions, infrastructures, economic interests and relations of force. Complex systems are not merely hard to understand. They are also traversed by actors who seek to maintain or increase their position. The question is therefore not only how to design more reflexive institutions. We must understand how they can resist capture and constrain those who benefit from the absence of limits.

No procedure is immune to relations of force. Contradiction can be protected, but it can also become a market in expertise where the best-endowed actors fund the analyses that serve their interests. Slowness can prevent an irreversible decision, but it can also delay necessary transformations. Institutional pluralism can multiply points of vigilance, but also fragment responsibility. A responsible political architecture therefore cannot promise to eliminate capture. It must seek to make it visible, contestable and costly.

Institutions charged with protecting the long term or representing the absent are not virtuous by nature. They must be evaluated by the properties they actually make effective. They should make public the interests engaged, the benefits distributed, the risks transferred and the uncertainties on which their decisions rest. They should guarantee access to independent expertise, limit the concentration of mandates, allow decisions to be revised and preserve avenues of contestation. Their legitimacy cannot come from a claim to speak definitively in the name of the future. It depends on their capacity to oblige the present to justify the effects it imposes on those who cannot yet take part in the decision.

Future generations cannot give a mandate to those who claim to defend their interests, and non-human species do not sit in the institutions that speak in their name. Every representation of the absent therefore carries a share of interpretation and of power. It can only be provisional, pluralist and revisable. Its role is not to define the future in place of those who will inhabit it, but to make visible consequences that the present might prefer to ignore. It does not abolish conflict. It creates conditions under which power must explain its choices, expose its interests and answer for the costs it transfers.

This requirement makes it possible to specify the sense of the word « accountable ». To be accountable for part of the possible does not mean being able to draw up its inventory. The living cannot be reduced to a unit of account. We do not know how to measure all the potentialities contained in an ecosystem, a species, an ecological relation or an evolutionary trajectory. We do not know what new forms might appear, which interactions will become decisive, or which capacities remain invisible because the conditions of their expression do not yet exist.

Part of this ignorance will never be corrected by a mere accumulation of data. Future possibilities depend on encounters, transformations and contexts that have not yet appeared. The value of what might disappear therefore remains in part beyond estimation. The word « accountable » here designates neither an exhaustive measurement nor a general optimisation of the living. It refers to the idea of having to answer for what our acts render durably impossible.

But answer to whom? Future generations are not present to call us to account. Non-humans have no political voice comparable to ours. The possible itself is not a subject to which we could address a justification. Responsibility therefore has no single creditor. It is exercised toward a plurality of beings, relations and conditions of existence that cannot always formulate a demand of their own.

This absence of a direct addressee does not abolish the obligation. It makes it harder to institute. To be accountable does not mean holding the accounts, but accepting that our power may be questioned in the name of what it affects, even when the totality of those effects cannot be measured and when those who will bear them cannot yet speak. Responsibility then resembles less an accounting than a watch, a care and an attention directed at the conditions that still permit adaptation, transmission and regeneration. What cannot be measured is not necessarily without value. What cannot be rebuilt cannot always be compensated. What remains unknown must not be regarded as empty.

This clarification also transforms the notion of the possible. The possible is not an abstract space situated above the world, nor a decision tree of which it would suffice to keep as many branches open as possible. Every possibility depends on material conditions. A forest's capacity to regenerate depends on its soils, its climate, its genetic diversity, the continuity of its habitats and the relations between species. A society's capacity to transform itself depends on its knowledge, its institutions, its infrastructures, its collective memory and the possibility of making contradiction heard within it. A person's capacity to choose depends on their health, their rights, their resources and the social structures in which they live.

The possible is therefore not a sky of virtualities. It is borne by bodies, soils, genomes, relations, skills and institutions. It constitutes a fragile property of material systems capable of maintaining several trajectories. Preserving the possible does not mean abstractly conserving the greatest number of options. It means maintaining the concrete capacities on which adaptation, regeneration, transmission and the appearance of new forms depend.

This responsibility does not concern only the humans to come. It also bears on the capacity of the biosphere to continue its own history. Biological diversity is not merely a set of resources available to our societies. Genomes, behaviours, symbioses and ecological networks carry the accumulated effects of billions of years of variation, constraint, adaptation and transformation.

It would be misleading to present this history as a catalogue of solutions elaborated with the future in view. Evolution does not foresee and pursues no project. Through contingent processes it produces forms capable of persisting under certain conditions and sometimes of transforming when those conditions change. The diversity of the living constitutes less a completed library than a reserve of capacities of which we still understand only a small part. In degrading it, we do not merely lose resources that might be useful to us. We suppress relations, evolutionary trajectories and possibilities of organisation that may never be reconstructed. We also reduce the capacity of the living to respond to future conditions we cannot foresee.

Our responsibility therefore extends beyond the conservation of a world suited to human needs. It concerns the continuity of a history that precedes us and exceeds us. We are not the authors of that creativity, but we have become capable of profoundly limiting its conditions.

The possible is nevertheless neither homogeneous nor equitably distributed. One and the same innovation can open capacities for some and reduce them for others. It can increase the autonomy of one group while creating new dependencies. It can raise immediate output while degrading the ecological conditions on which future output will depend. It is therefore not enough to ask how many possibilities a trajectory opens. One must examine for whom it opens them, for whom it closes them, who benefits from its effects, who bears its risks and which losses will become impossible to repair.

Refusing to maximise the possible does not abolish conflicts. Preserving a community's capacities may come into tension with the regeneration of an environment. A transformation necessary for some may impose losses on others. No general formula makes it possible automatically to rank these values or to resolve every trade-off. Responsibility does not supply a single answer, but it alters the burden of justification.

That burden must not be distributed symmetrically. It becomes heavier when a decision combines irreversible effects, consequences imposed without real participation, a concentration of benefits, a transfer of costs onto the most vulnerable, a low possibility of repair and the existence of less destructive alternatives. Whoever proposes a transformation liable durably to suppress the capacities of others must provide more than a promise of efficiency or a favourable overall balance sheet. They must show why that loss is necessary, why it cannot be avoided, and how those who bear its consequences will be protected, involved and compensated as far as possible.

This asymmetry of justification does not resolve every conflict. It does, however, prevent existing power from being treated as a sufficient argument and prevents the costs imposed on the absent or the vulnerable from disappearing behind an abstract addition of benefits. A just decision cannot be reduced to visibility and contestation, but no decision can lay claim to justice if its effects, its interests and its losses remain invisible or shielded from contestation.

This requirement finally meets a tragic limit. Some possibilities have already been destroyed. Species have disappeared, languages and knowledge have been lost, environments have been transformed to the point of no longer being able to recover their earlier history. Peoples have been displaced or destroyed, and no future policy will be able to restore fully what was suppressed. The irreversible is not merely an error that is hard to correct. It is sometimes a definitive loss.

A thought of responsibility therefore cannot confine itself to preserving the future. It must make room for the memory of what has been destroyed. Some losses cannot be compensated, and not every harm is convertible into reparation. The word « accountable » takes on a heavier sense here. It no longer designates only the obligation to anticipate consequences. It also refers to a debt toward what was destroyed without being restorable.

This debt cannot always be repaid. It can be acknowledged, transmitted and transformed into a requirement of vigilance. Mourning does not reopen the vanished possibilities, but it prevents their disappearance from being reduced to one cost among others. Acknowledging the irreparable does not mean immobilising the world or indiscriminately conserving everything that exists, including unjust structures. Memory must illuminate action without paralysing it. It reminds us that not every loss becomes a lesson, that not every destruction can be compensated, and that some decisions commit more than a calculation between advantages and costs.

Responsibility thus bears on three temporalities. It concerns the future, because our decisions modify the conditions of those who will come after us. It concerns the present, because capacities, benefits and risks are unequally distributed. It also concerns the past, because we inherit losses, debts and destructions whose effects continue to organise the world.

Its positive content can then be formulated without attributing to it a power it does not possess. It requires justifying the effects of our power, preserving fundamental capacities when they are threatened, repairing what can still be repaired and maintaining the memory of what can never be given back. This ethics promises neither mastery of the future nor the resolution of every conflict. Its modesty is not a withdrawal. It is the consequence of a thinking that refuses to turn uncertainty into a pretext for inaction or into a licence to dominate.

Collective wisdom would therefore be neither omniscience nor absolute control. It would reside in the capacity to make errors visible, to limit the possibility for the most powerful to transfer their costs onto others, and to keep the means of revising institutions when their own rules become inadequate. A wiser society would not be a society incapable of being wrong. It would be a society in which no power could make the world poorer in capacities without having to answer for what it closes off, for those it affects and for what no reparation will be able to restore.

We are not the sovereign architects of the future. We are participants situated within systems we do not entirely master and whose capacities are profoundly unequally distributed. Nor are we accountable for the whole of the possible. The possible does not belong to us. It exists in the spontaneous dynamics of the living, in physical processes, in ecological relations and in cultural transformations that no actor entirely directs.

Our responsibility remains partial. It depends on our real power, on our knowledge, on our capacities for action and on the consequences we can reasonably anticipate. It does not charge us with defining the future as a whole. It asks us to answer for the closures our power produces, above all when they are imposed on those who can neither decide them nor repair them.

We may be neither the centre nor the goal of the Universe. Nothing guarantees that reflexivity will lead to wisdom, and nothing obliges a species capable of anticipation to choose responsibility. This absence of necessity does not make the choice insignificant. It reveals its scope.

Responsibility takes shape when matter become reflexive recognises the limits of its power, the unequal distribution of its effects, and the part it plays in what it transmits, preserves, repairs or renders definitively impossible.