The Temporal Dimension of Responsibility: Intergenerational Subjects and the Temporal Limits of Lemma 3. Article 7

Lemma 3, formulated in "The Collective Subject and Distributed Responsibility: Ontological Conditions for Organisational Accountability," establishes the ontological indestructibility of the structural bond between a collective decision and the space of irreversible losses it opens — as long as the ontological continuity of the subject is preserved. But Lemma 3 is silent about time. Does this bond persist across generational change? Who bears it when those who made the decisions no longer exist, yet the consequences continue to open new loss-spaces for subjects who were not yet born? This article extends the ontological framework of ATTS into the temporal dimension. It introduces the concept of the temporal carrier horizon (TCH) — the structural boundary beyond which the ontological bond does not disappear but requires a new bearer. It formulates the category of the intergenerational subject as a distinct ontological type that satisfies the subject-criterion under Axiom A1. Lemma 4 formalises the conditions of temporal continuity (TC1–TC3) as the temporal analogue of the spatial conditions NC1–NC3. Four limit cases — climate responsibility, nuclear waste, constitutional obligations, and digital heritage — verify the operational force of the introduced concepts.