System responsibility

System responsibility is a very recent term in the responsibility debate. It has developed as a result of the problems described that complex issues cannot be attributed to specific persons or groups of persons. This is because the modern technological processes already described and the modern social processes on which they are based take place in a systemic manner. They are complex and often reflexively interwoven. And they can no longer be attributed to individuals. In order to refer to responsibility in any meaningful way, one tries to attribute responsibility to systems.

Systems as such are no longer the object (the "what for?") of responsibility. In this sense, for example, a mining company is no longer responsible for its mining operations. Rather, for example, in the event of unforeseeable environmental damage through no fault of its own, a mining company could transfer the responsibility to its higher-level system. This might be the technological system of an industry or even society, including its good practice and governance structures. In short: system responsibility makes the system itself the bearer (the "who?") of responsibility.

In a system-theoretical sense, a system is a structure that consists of structures and processes that are interwoven and interdependent. Systems are structurally orientated towards their environment and cannot exist without their environment. However, in their internal organisation they are autonomous and autopoietic. This means that they have their own laws, which to a certain extent separate them from their environment. The laws consolidate over time and perpetuate from within the systems. For example, our society can be understood as a system with its own processes and structures. At the same time, a society can also have subsystems, such as the economy, science or certain technologies. The respective systems have their own laws and are functionally distinct from one another. The economy has a different function and different modes of operation than science. Mining, for example, could also be described as a subsystem of economics, which itself has its own logic and laws within a society.

But how can you make a system responsible? How can we meaningfully speak of a system as a bearer of responsibility if it is an impersonal entity and only arises from the interaction of its internal processes? “You could also say that responsibility has become an atopia, a non-place, with increasing complexity. It can no longer be localised, delimited or pinpointed. It wanders within the subjectless processes, eludes our cognitive grasp and resists attempts at normative definition." This means that although responsibility exists in a system, it cannot be grasped. So mining bears responsibility if there is a mining system - which can be presumed, at least in broad terms - that is a functional subsystem with its own logic, has its own practised processes and a self-perpetuating set of rules. The question remains: How can this be done?

In simple terms, the answer is: through design and/or context steering. This takes account of the fact that a system is embedded in an environment in which it has to maintain itself. On the one hand, one could attempt to feed ethical aspects into the processes of a system and thereby maintain a kind of moral quality of the system events (design). Or one could try to steer the system dynamics in a desired direction via legislation or monetary incentives or similar (context). This would, so to speak, change the framework conditions within which a system operates. Circumstances are created that influence the system's range of possibilities. This opens up a scope in which the self-organising dynamics of the relevant system can unfold.

Example

Government funding measures for mining, for example, could provide an impetus for secured access to raw material supply of the economic system as a whole, thereby influencing the internal dynamics of the economic system. For example, if certain mining technology infrastructures were to receive special funding because they are considered to be more environmentally or climate-friendly this would be an attempt to indirectly feed environmental or climate responsibility into the mining system. As a result, the individual mining engineer would no longer be responsible per se for the environmental impact resulting from the use of a certain technological basis, but rather the system to which they belong. For their part, the mining engineer can act ethically within the scope of their possibilities. This is by influencing the ethical quality of the systemic processes to which their responsibility has been delegated.

In the understanding of system responsibility, individuals act responsibly by delegating responsibility to systems. At the same time, an individual's actions, which are considered ethically positive, are qualified by the fact that they influence the ethical quality of the overall order and its processes. In turn, the overall order also determines the individual's options for action and thus influences the positive quality of the individual's actions. In this way, processes can also be personalised, for example if they are assigned to a specific position and thus to an employee who is responsible for this very process.

As mentioned above, the reflexive and complex structure of a social system means that responsibility wanders around the system. It cannot be pinned down to a specific systematic location. However, to assume that responsibility would therefore disappear and that a system would become a kind of ethically neutral space is far from the truth. On the contrary, responsibility may even have increased, albeit in a different quality.

Complex system responsibility is an attempt to provide an answer to the complexity of modern societies with their equally complex social and technological subsystems. Last but not least, it protects the individual from being overwhelmed, but without releasing them from their responsibility. Because in order to interrupt the self-running of operationally closed systems and to channel their internal logic, it is necessary for people to challenge the rules and influence their ethical quality. In extreme cases, this would even mean refusing to carry out certain processes in the system. If function holders in a system refuse to perform their function properly and routinely, processes come to a standstill and the system is disrupted and challenged. And the ethical conscience of a human subject, which can lead to such a refusal, cannot be delegated to the subjectless system. The more centralised and powerful the function holders are, the greater the disruption will be. Nevertheless, power in a system never lies exclusively with one person: "No part of the system can control others without being subject to control itself".

The power to influence the ethical quality of a system does not have to be located exclusively at the highest levels of management. Each mining engineer can also have a high level of influence in the system, for instance if they discover an issue that can stop the extraction process, e.g. a hazard like unstable slope conditions or a protected plant or animal species in the mining area.