Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability
Evidence
But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility. Now, when the appeal to individual ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous – in her book Frames Of War, Judith Butler uses the term ‘responsibi-lization’ to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on structure at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject - does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the climate solution is to say ‘no-one is responsible — that’s the problem’ rather than ‘everyone do your bit’ is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe of environmental ethics.
- SEED: An essay contrasting individual-responsibility climate rhetoric (recycling, footprint calculators, meatless Mondays) with structure-level collective action, drawing on Butler’s responsibilization concept.
- XREF: connects to: Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 145; Voters blame governments for privatized failures rather than the companies responsible — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 128; Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463 (+15 more)
Related
- Individual-responsibility climate appeals let impersonal structure escape accountability (similarity 0.92)
- Climate responsibility belongs to impersonal structure, not any individual subject (similarity 0.90)
- Capitalism shifts blame between individuals and structure to deflect accountability (similarity 0.80)
- Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures (similarity 0.79)
- When everyone shares responsibility, no one personally feels responsible (similarity 0.79)
- Diffused responsibility makes people act more cruelly than individual accountability (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority
#corroborates(0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463 - Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt
#corroborates(0.92) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 377 - Individualism becomes a moral defense of the status quo once group-based paternalism is challenged
#corroborates(0.92) - Effective systems of wrongdoing recruit dutiful subordinates who disown responsibility for harm
#corroborates(0.90) - Diffused responsibility makes people act more cruelly than individual accountability
#corroborates(0.88) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 436 - Holding one kind of responsibility can shield actors from attribution of the other
#corroborates(0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4003 - Civil-servant honor substitutes discipline for individual moral responsibility
#corroborates(0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 94 - Casting discrimination as pathology evades individual responsibility for acts committed
#corroborates(0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 680 - Monopolized responsibility dissolves individual accountability throughout the totalitarian movement
#corroborates(0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 869 - Duty-based moralities subordinate the individual to maintenance of social norms.
#corroborates(0.78) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 553 - Moral responsibility presupposes that people have self-influence over their actions.
#qualifies(0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 65