The Telic Way: Authorship, Responsibility, and Structural Coherence Across Democracy, Capitalism, Law, and Artificial Intelligence

Start here (base logic + reading order): Free Will Without Metaphysical Magic (++++ ≠ +++=). Modern institutions increasingly produce harms without a clear author. Responsibility dissolves across bureaucracies, markets, and automated systems, leaving power operational but unowned. The Telic Way (long-horizon coherence) is a structural framework for preventing this drift by preserving authorship—keeping decision power legible to identifiable human authorities across time. Authorship attaches to those who retained authority to halt, alter, or escalate at the moment uncertainty was closed into action (resolution). Responsibility is presumed at the highest level unless clearly and contemporaneously delegated. Corporations are treated as agent-like vehicles, not moral agents; responsibility remains with natural persons. Applied to AI, the framework distinguishes evaluation from agency and fixes responsibility upstream regardless of automation or emergence. Power without legible delegation carries responsibility by default.