Teleological Emergence and the Ethics of Sufficiency Reconfiguring Agency under Chronic Erosion and Faceless Evil

This article articulates a comprehensive philosophical framework addressing the crisis of human agency in late modernity, characterized by chronic instability, algorithmic governance, and structural erosion. Moving beyond the classical dichotomy of process versus purpose, this paper advances the concept of teleological emergence, arguing that purpose is not a pre-given telos but a provisional stabilization generated within ongoing processes of leakage, masking, and reconfiguration. Central to this framework is the Dynamic Mask, reconceived not as a mechanism of deception, but as the mediating structure through which indeterminate potentiality achieves determinate orientation via recursive intentionality. Furthermore, the article offers a structured differentiation of contemporary moral crises by specifying what the Arendtian banality of evil, the Baumanian analysis of structural distance, and the present framework's concept of faceless evil each contribute, introducing algorithmic pre-emption and the Threshold of Sufficiency as irreducible variables. In response, the framework proposes an Ethics of Sufficiency grounded in situated responsibility. This normative stance rejects both Sartrean absolute responsibility and consequentialist teleology, advocating instead for the preservation of the existential conditions that allow finite beings to sustain homeorhetic continuity and moral responsiveness. Keywords: teleological emergence, dynamic mask, finite continuance, situated responsibility, faceless evil, ethics of sufficiency, homeorhesis, recursive intentionality, algorithmic pre-emption.