Morality of action, reflexivity and the relational subject

Since the time of Aristotle, traditional ethics has imputed the morality of action to the ‘acting subject’ on the basis of a principle of linear causality. Over time and, in particular, with the advent of the modern social sciences, the social, economic, and cultural conditioning weighing on the subject have been evidenced. The result has been to attribute moral responsibility to a ‘conditioned subject’, one that is constrained by existing societal structures (including so called ‘unjust laws’). The globalization of society changes the epistemological frame because the importance of systems of interdependence increases at the expense of functional systems. Moral responsibility encounters a process of morphogenesis such that, as a result, it becomes real only if it makes reference to a ‘relational subject’ constituted by the network of participants. The subject, acting in a societal network, is required to know and configure this network ‘relationally’. Ethics is required to make itself relational, in the sense that the attribution of responsibility for acting for good or ill cannot be limited to a single act, but invokes the reflexivity of subjects and of social processes that take place in networks of relations. The morality of action must make reference to the reflexive awareness that subjects have of how good and evil are produced by social relations and consist of social relations within increasingly complex causal networks. The ethics of intention is no longer sufficient. It must be integrated with an ethics of responsibility that is not restricted to the direct consequences of individual acts, but also takes into account the indirect consequences of relational networks.