CONCEPT
Absolute Responsibility
Sartre's uncompromising ethical claim — because no external force makes choices, the responsibility for every choice falls entirely on the chooser, with no residue transferable to circumstance, tool, or system.
The ethical corollary of condemned to be free is that the responsibility for every choice is absolute and untransferable. No external force makes choices. Only people make choices. The market is a pattern of other people's choices. The technology is a capability someone chose to deploy. The competitive landscape is the aggregate of choices made by specific actors with specific names. Every appeal to necessity that conceals a choice is a fabrication; every alibi that distributes responsibility to impersonal forces is a flight from the weight that belongs, irreducibly, to the individual consciousness that chose. In the AI age, where the alibis have multiplied with unprecedented sophistication, the principle of absolute responsibility becomes the most demanding ethical claim in modern philosophy — and the most practically consequential, because the person who owns her choices retains the capacity to choose differently.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Segal captures the principle when he writes that 'the whip and the hand that held it