Beyond the Responsibility Gap: Relational Agency, Distributed Responsibility, and Systemic Pathology A Relational Theory of Responsibility

This preprint develops a relational theory of responsibility for complex institutional and socio-technical societies. The paper argues that the so-called responsibility gap does not arise because responsibility disappears in complex technological or institutional systems, but because responsibility is still conceptualized within an individualistic ontology of agency that fails to account for the relational and practice-based structure of action. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s analysis of rule-following, practices, and forms of life, the paper develops a conceptual framework based on the concepts of relational agency, distributed responsibility, authority illusion, ethical withdrawal, systemic pathology, and ethical homeostasis. The paper argues that responsibility in contemporary societies is not located in isolated individuals, rules, or technological systems, but in relational structures of practices, institutions, decision architectures, and epistemic systems that organize action and knowledge production. The paper proposes that many contemporary ethical and political problems in artificial intelligence, institutional governance, and complex organizations should be understood not as responsibility gaps but as structural features of distributed responsibility systems and, in some cases, as forms of systemic pathology. The concept of ethical homeostasis is introduced to describe the regulatory function of ethics in stabilizing institutional and epistemic structures in complex societies. This paper is part of a broader research framework on responsibility, institutional action, epistemic structures, and socio-technical systems.