Responsibility Without a Global Judge: Answerability, Excuse, and Blame for Embedded Agents in a Consistency-Constrained Information History

Paper 23, Action Without a Global Controller, isolated a typed responsibility-assessment basis profile and deferred verdict weighting, blame, excuse, collective responsibility, and the dynamic correction of verdicts. Paper 24, Autonomy Without a Global Author, added the ownership and authorship standings. This paper pays the resulting responsibility debt without positing a global judge: a subsystem that jointly possesses complete access to every relevant agent's states, options, and reasons; an exhaustive, authoritative norm set; infallible counterfactual foresight; uniquely correct verdict selection; and binding authority to assign it. Responsibility is reconstructed as a specification-relative, profile-valued, challenge-open answerability standing. A declared responsibility specification Sigma_R — carrying an applied norm, a defeater map, and a standing rule — maps the basis profile and the authorship standings to a typed verdict profile whose core is answerability, with blame a downstream standing built on it. The absence of a global judge is made load-bearing: it forces assessor-relativity, a warrant discipline separating attributed from warranted blame, mandatory corrigibility, public declarability of Sigma_R, and a standing-to-blame condition distinct from the bare power to issue a verdict. Two results organize the account. The No-Factorization result establishes that, for any admissible Sigma_R whose applied norm is genuinely multi-component and interactive, the responsibility verdict is not a function of any single basis component alone; blame reduces neither to causal contribution, nor control, nor authorship, nor outcome, nor norm-violation. The No-Luck-Warrant result establishes that, under conduct-based blame specifications, no outcome-only appraisal rule can warrant differential blame between two histories that differ only in the realized outcome, even when the assessor observes that outcome; resultant moral luck affects liability and repair, not warranted blame. Verdicts are themselves corrigible, governed by a declared procedural floor with no final adjudicator. Desert, sanction, and collective allocation are typed but deferred. Responsibility is neither a judgment from nowhere nor a metaphysical residue: it is corrigible, typed appraisal from inside the history. ALAC Paper 25. Third panel of the sixth triptych (Action 23 -> Autonomy 24 -> Responsibility 25). Part of the Consistency-Constrained Information History (Akashic Ledger Architecture Cosmology) series.