Action Without Acts: The Institutional Production of Action and the Doctrinal Conditions of Responsibility
Abstract This article advances a modest doctrinal proposal: Christian theological responsibility is not merely act-based but institutionally conditioned, and the doctrines of sin, judgment, and moral agency may therefore benefit from explicit articulation considering institutional forms that may decline to produce action. The social and institutional hierarchies that reduce some human beings to objects of management rather than addressees of action and speech are not new; what may be comparatively new is the degree to which contemporary infrastructural systems can accomplish this without any individual ever intending or even perceiving it. The argument proceeds by suggesting that the tradition’s resources for indirect agency cooperation, omission, vicarious responsibility, structural sin are, on inspection, without exception act-derivative, and that certain contemporary infrastructural configurations decline, at the operating level, to produce the act on which these resources depend. The diagnosis offered is therefore not that the tradition is silent before such configurations but that its categories presuppose an institutional production of action that can no longer simply be assumed. Three institutional examples, robotic debt-recovery in Australia, the Dutch childcare-benefits scandal, and platform content moderation, introduce the problem at the outset and are returned to throughout. The argument is then developed, more gradually than a brief summary can suggest, through engagement with classical accounts of the act-grammar (Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, O’Donovan), social ontology of action (Anscombe, Searle), the political phenomenology of action and judgment (Arendt), and the reconstruction of responsibility under structural conditions (Bonhoeffer); through a defined distinction between operating and upstream levels of infrastructural systems; and through four convergent mechanisms of withdrawal. It closes by proposing how the doctrines of sin, judgment, and moral agency might be reformulated under the condition that institutional forms can fail to produce action.
Publisert i Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 2026
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