The Inclination of Reality: Potential as Readiness: 6 The Ethics of Readiness

To live in a world understood as readiness is to inhabit a profoundly different ethics — one grounded not in control, but in attunement.

If reality is inclination, then every act of construal participates in the leaning of the real. The question is no longer what we choose to do within the world, but how we orient within its ongoing readiness.

Ethics, in this sense, is not the management of outcomes but the modulation of posture. It is the art of inclining well — of aligning one’s readiness with the larger coherence of the field. The moral question becomes: toward what does this readiness lean?

When we mistake readiness for control, we fall into the ontology of force: we imagine that the world must be made to move. But when readiness is recognised as ontological rather than optional, agency becomes relational. To act is to join a leaning already underway — to participate in the tendency of potential to construe itself.

This reframes responsibility. It is not the burden of determining outcomes, but the care of participating with sensitivity in the field’s ongoing inclination. Each construal affects the coherence of the whole; each act is a re-alignment of readiness at some scale.

In this view, responsiveness replaces obligation. Awareness replaces assertion. The good is not imposed; it is resonant.

To live ethically, then, is to listen for the inclination already present — to move in sympathy with the readiness of the world rather than against it.

Ethics becomes a practice of co-leaning: the shared modulation of readiness across the field of potential.

In that sense, every genuine act of understanding is already ethical: it is an alignment of construal with the world’s own leaning toward coherence.