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

Debates on responsibility in contemporary societies frequently invoke the notion of a “responsibility gap,” particularly in discussions of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and complex institutional decision-making (Matthias 2004; Sparrow 2007; Floridi et al. 2018). These debates often assume that increasing technological and organizational complexity makes it difficult to identify responsible agents, thereby creating situations in which responsibility appears to disappear. This article argues that the responsibility gap is not primarily a technological or legal problem, but a conceptual and ontological one arising from an individualistic conception of agency that fails to account for the relational and practice-based structure of action in complex societies. Drawing on a Wittgensteinian approach to rule-following, practices, and forms of life (Wittgenstein 1953; Wittgenstein 1969), the article argues that responsibility does not belong to isolated individuals, rules, or technical systems, but to rule-governed social practices and institutional forms of life within which actions acquire their meaning. Responsibility therefore does not disappear in complex socio-technical systems; rather, it becomes relationally structured and institutionally distributed across networks of actors, roles, and decision processes. The responsibility gap is thus better understood as a grammatical and ontological confusion about the nature of agency, action, and responsibility. To address this confusion, the article develops a theoretical framework based on the concepts of relational agency, distributed responsibility, authority illusion, ethical withdrawal, and systemic pathology. Within this framework, institutions and socio-technical systems are understood as relational structures composed of interdependent practices organized through institutional roles, division of labor, and epistemic structures that coordinate action and knowledge production. The article further argues that responsibility in contemporary societies is not limited to decision-making but also concerns epistemic structures through which knowledge is produced, validated, and distributed, particularly in AI-mediated societies where artificial intelligence systems increasingly function as epistemic authorities. Rather than a responsibility gap, modern societies face a structural condition in which responsibility becomes distributed, obscured, and embedded in institutional, technological, and epistemic structures. This article therefore develops a relational theory of responsibility for complex institutional and socio-technical societies.