Structural Responsibility: A theory of responsibility and causation beyond human-scale agency - Paperback

by Zane Wu (Author), Jin Tao (Editor)

Structural Responsibility develops a formalizable structural framework for responsibility, causation, and harm at scales where event-based, intention-centered, and narrative models fail.

The framework treats responsibility not as blame or moral judgment, but as an attribution rule for where constraint, repair, and intervention must attach once a system's reachability has been deformed and another system's recoverability reduced. It operates without appeal to consciousness, intent, or human-scale intelligibility, and is designed for cumulative, non-eventive dynamics including replication, branching, distributed control, and irreversible structural change.

Rather than offering ethics guidance, policy proposals, or governance prescriptions, the book provides a diagnostic structure: how to identify structural harm, trace responsibility across non-human-scale systems, and distinguish narrative repair from genuine structural repair. The result is a framework intended for rigorous analytical use and for later formal extension in domains where traditional units of analysis become insufficient.