ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that new forms of hierarchy emerge with extended moral chains of responsibility, implying that actors have a new indirect duty of responsibility or a duty of care for others. It seeks to stake out a series of claims with regard to the rise of the international ethics of moral agency, premised upon our embeddedness in complex chains of global interconnection. The chapter explains how understandings of relational responsibility have become increasingly central to mainstream policy and academic thinking, highlighting the conceptual links between new institutionalism and the ontological or ‘new materialist’ turn in social theory and the rise of post-rationalist or post-Rawlsian thinking more broadly. It highlights how the ethics of global relational embeddedness redistribute ethical and political responsibility in ways which, rather than challenging power inequalities, appear to affirm or reify them. Ontological non-linear or distributed responsibility knows no political or private subjects, only subjects always and already embedded in fluid and complex networks of association.
