Responsibility arises only in undecidable space that calculable programs try to close

Evidence

Something of the requisite restlessness is captured in an oftquoted Samuel Beckett passage, particularly its fi nal two words: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett’s admonition to “fail better” powerfully reminds us that limitations of knowledge and power do not erase the responsibility to strive. Indeed, they are part of the very space in which agency and responsibility are born. As Jacques Derrida wrote— in words that merit constant consultation: “[A] decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility… . [T]here can be no moral or po liti cal responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable.” Yet the space or passage separating choice and consequence is precisely what costbenefi t analysis seeks to close. Policies, we are told, do not result from the judgment of a responsible subject but instead “are hostage to what the facts turn out to show in partic u lar domains.” No air reaches this closed passage. Try as we might to inhabit the calculable program of welfare economics, the necessity of deciding amidst conditions of undecidability remains and in fact underwrites the very meaning of environmental law. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 633

Categorization

• QUESTION: Derrida’s undecidability as the birth of responsibility — worth chasing the whole argument in light of how cost-benefit claims to eliminate it.
• recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Existence cannot be exchanged, so welfare economics cannot price irredeemable loss — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 515; Operator failure in abstract systems is ineradicable because humans err — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 361; Systemic complexity disperses responsibility so no individual is originator of an action (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Operator failure in abstract systems is ineradicable because humans err #expands (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 361
• Systemic complexity disperses responsibility so no individual is originator of an action #contradicts (0.75)
• Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 145
• Institutions fail to address intractable problems because responsibility becomes diffusely delegated. #contradicts (0.75) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1976
• Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority #contradicts (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463
• Dividing lethal acts into small technical tasks diffuses agents’ moral responsibility #contradicts (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1934
• Intentions cannot derive from a given, only from a non-existent end #expands (0.70) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1142
• Unbounded rationality fails due to combinatorial explosion of decision spaces #expands (0.70) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 737