23 Answerability and the Ethics of Construal

Series: Construal and the Collective – Part 23

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Introduction: Construal as Ethical Act

In a relational ontology, meaning is not extracted from a world but brought forth through construal. Every construal is thus an act—not only of sense-making, but of world-making. This implies a radical ethics:

We are answerable for the worlds we construe.

In this post, we ask: What does it mean to be ethically responsible in and through the act of construal?

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1. Not an Ethics of Representation

Traditional ethics often imagines moral action as a matter of truthful representation or right conduct. But if the real is not pre-given—if it is always the outcome of reflexive construal—then ethics cannot be grounded in fidelity to an objective world.

Instead, ethics must attend to:

• The consequences of construal

• The relational architectures it enables or forecloses

• The forms of life it legitimises, marginalises, or renders unthinkable

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2. Symbolic Responsibility

Every act of construal has ripple effects. It participates in configuring:

• Who and what is intelligible

• What counts as agency or reality

• Which values, patterns, or trajectories are taken as possible

To construe is to shape the very terms by which others will construe. This is symbolic responsibility.

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3. Answerability and Reflexive Awareness

Answerability begins with recognising that construal is never neutral. It is always positioned, scaled, and phased within a social formation. The more reflexive our construals become, the more we are called to:

• Notice their implications

• Attend to their effects across registers (semantic, social, material)

• Remain open to reframing when they do harm

This is not moral guilt. It is epistemic and ontological accountability.

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4. Ethical Constraints as Generative

In a relational frame, ethics is not an external limit on symbolic action. It is an internal condition of symbolic coherence. Symbolic infrastructures that disregard answerability tend to:

• Collapse into incoherence

• Rely on exclusion, disavowal, or coercion

• Generate realities unsustainable across scales

Ethical reflexivity, then, is not a burden. It is a principle of generativity.

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5. Collective Answerability

Since construal is fundamentally social, so too is ethical response. We do not bear the weight of world-making alone. Collective answerability involves:

• Shared reflexivity

• Structures for re-construal

• Practices of co-accountability

These may take the form of councils, feedback rituals, dialogic protocols, or shared commitments to symbolic hospitality.

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Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Possibility

To construe is to bring a world into being. To do so reflexively is to take responsibility—not just for what one means, but for what meanings enable. Ethics, then, is not an afterthought to ontology. It is built into the very logic of emergence.

In the next post, we explore how this ethical dimension of construal underpins new models of collective agency—forms of symbolic life that distribute meaning-making across the full ecology of the social.