Acts carry ethical significance apart from any notion of answerability

Evidence

I am not implying that what Oedipus does is best explained by relating it to magic as opposed to moral agency—that since he believed he had unwittingly released a dangerous pollution by killing his father he then sought to stop it by punishing and exiling himself. (This is what Freud saw in the Oedipus story—transgressions against magically conditioned prohibitions that therefore have nothing to do with morality.) I am urging that acts can have an ethical significance without necessarily having to be interpreted in terms of “answerability.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 458

Categorization

• DEFINE: Separates ‘answerability’ (an agent being called to account) from ethical significance (an act carrying moral weight regardless of who answers for it).
• XREF: connects to: Being an ethical agent requires supplying non-externally-dictated reasons for acting. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 120