The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 11 Political and Ethical Horizons

Human becoming is inseparable from the collective conditions that grant or deny access to possibility. Political structures and ethical formations do not merely regulate life; they shape the very distribution of what can be actualised.

To speak of possibility is to speak of power. Legal frameworks, economic systems, and cultural hierarchies set thresholds for entry: who may learn, who may move, who may speak, who may flourish. These thresholds are not natural limits but politically constructed boundaries that stratify the field of becoming.

Ethical horizons emerge within and against these boundaries. They name the struggles over justice, dignity, and recognition that contest exclusions and open new pathways of actualisation. Ethics here is not abstract moral rule but the lived negotiation of how lives may unfold in relation to one another.

Political and ethical horizons thus reveal the uneven terrain of possibility. They remind us that no life unfolds in isolation, and that becoming is conditioned by collective arrangements of access and exclusion. To study these horizons is to confront the contested ground on which possibility itself is distributed and reconfigured.