The Architecture of Moral Impossibility: Ethical Symmetry, Ontological Damnation and the Collapse of Judgment in Societies of Structural Antagonism

Abstract

This article investigates how social structures produce and sustain insoluble moral antagonisms, transforming moral agency into an instrument of damnation. Through two complementary thought experiments — the perfect symmetry of two soldiers in conflict and the absolute dilemma of the "Atemporal Circle" — the paper demonstrates the collapse of traditional normative ethics before structural impossibility. Adopting Rahel Jaeggi's immanent critique, it condemns structures not from an external standpoint but from their own normative failures. Ontological damnation is grounded in Heideggerian temporality and Taylor's strong evaluations. The article incorporates a productive tension with the non-Western tradition of dharma (Bhagavad Gita), showing how sacred duty — which anchors Arjuna's action in a legitimate cosmos — collapses when no such cosmic order exists. The Nuremberg trials are analyzed as a paradigmatic historical case of attempted (and partially failed) moral adjudication under structural symmetry. The maternal perspective is developed in its own section, grounded in Judith Butler (Precarious Life and Frames of War), revealing that the mother's damnation precedes any choice and is structurally more radical than the son's. It explicitly delimits the methodological status of the essay, defines “ontological damnation” through a negative and positive definition distinguishing it from trauma, moral guilt and moral injury, and offers a boundary case to test the robustness of the structural hypocrisy criteria. It concludes that strategic rupture of complicity — not moral nihilism — is the only epistemically founded response to a structural social hypocrisy that manufactures impossibilities and blames individuals for them; and explicitly delimits the scope of this rupture to avoid misreading as political neutralism or universal suspension of moral judgment.