Responsibility as Architecture: Participation, Imago Dei, and the Limits of the Single Foundation

This article examines the foundation of the creature’s moral responsibility and maintains that the search for a single property capable of grounding it—rationality, consciousness, will, or freedom—is ill-posed, for each is a condition and none is a foundation. An architectural model is proposed as an alternative: responsibility emerges from a chain of dependencies that links the creature’s ontological participation to its constitution as a vice-regent imago Dei, and from this to normativity and imputation. Three types of necessity are distinguished in the transitions—revelational, analytic, and conditioned. It is argued that vice-regency is a mode of participation, and not a parallel foundation, and that the category is indispensable precisely where compatibilism is insufficient: in the guilt of condition. The conclusion is that obligation derives from position, not from capacity, and that the architecture explains in a unified way what single foundations leave apart.

DIETRICH, Pablo; DIETRICH, Maurília Gabriela da Silva. Responsibility as Architecture: Participation, Imago Dei, and the Limits of the Single Foundation. Zenodo, tradução dos autores, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23821046.