ABSTRACT
Premodern traditional ethics has imputed the morality of action to the “acting subject” on the basis of a principle of linear causality. With the advent of modern social sciences, the social, economic, and cultural conditioning weighing on the human subject have been evidenced. The result has been to attribute moral responsibility to a “conditioned subject” who, in turn, attributes the responsibility to the existing societal structures. In this way, responsibility has become anonymous, and its weight has been transferred to the welfare state. A sort of vicious circle was generated, which now can only be broken by new relational subjects, both individual and collective, who take responsibility for social networks that produce relational evils at a distance. Ethics is required to make itself relational, in the sense that the attribution of responsibility for acting for good or bad cannot be limited either to a single act or to structures, but must invoke the reflexivity of relational subjects and the reflectivity of social processes that take place in networks of relations.
