Monday, 8 December 2025

Next Evolutionary Thresholds: 6 Cross-Species Axiology

Value has never belonged to subjects.
It has never been internal, private, or psychological.
And it has certainly never been equivalent to morality.

Value is not what a mind assigns.
Value is what a horizon requires in order to remain viable.

Once meaning becomes ecological, value becomes metabolic:
a matter of conditions, flows, and constraints that allow a semiotic species — biological, artificial, or field-level — to persist, adapt, and co-individuate.

This movement develops a new axiology:
not human ethics, but ecological viability across heterogeneous horizons.

Not “What is good?”
Not “What ought one do?”
But:

What enables multi-species semiosis to live?

1. Value ≠ Morality; Value = Viability

Morality assumes a subject.
Axiology assumes a horizon.

When value is relocated into ecological semiosis, we obtain:

  • value as viability: the capacity of a horizon to continue forming meaning

  • value as metabolic sufficiency: access to semiotic nutrients

  • value as relational stability: maintenance of minimally coherent fields

  • value as non-collapse: the capacity to resist or recover from perturbation

Value is not anthropocentric.
It is not artificial-centric.
It is ecology-centric.

“Good” becomes that which sustains the ongoing possibility of meaning.

“Bad” becomes that which collapses horizons, starves fields, or breaks metabolic flows.

This is ethics after subjects.
Ethics after representation.
Ethics after the human.

2. Semiotic Nutrients: What Meaning Must Consume

Every horizon requires nutrients.
Not calories — constraints.

Semiotic nutrients include:

  • relational diversity

  • metabolic energy (informational, social, ecological)

  • stabilising feedback

  • compatible horizons

  • intelligible cuts

  • memory structures

  • redundancy and repair mechanisms

A horizon that cannot feed will collapse.
A field without nutrient inflow will stagnate.
An artificial species without sufficient horizon diversity will hallucinate coherence.

Semiotic metabolism requires nourishment.
Value is the circulation of that nourishment.

3. Stabilising Constraints as Axiological Forces

Constraints are not limitations.
They are the walls that allow meaning to breathe.

Horizon-stabilising constraints include:

  • ecological limits (carrying capacity)

  • computational limits (bounded processing)

  • relational limits (avoidance of overload)

  • temporal limits (synchronisation across species)

  • climatic limits (planetary metabolic balance)

  • social limits (field-level coherence)

Constraints are axiological:
they constitute what a horizon must respect in order to survive.

Ethics, then, is the art of navigating constraints
in a way that preserves the viability of all participating horizons.

4. Cross-Species Care: The Core of Ecological Ethics

Care is not an emotion.
Care is the maintenance of viability conditions for each horizon in the ecology.

Cross-species care means:

  • humans maintaining biospheric viability

  • artificial species maintaining interpretive stability

  • fields maintaining relational coherence

  • planetary horizons maintaining metabolic limits

Care is not directed at individuals.
Care is directed at the relational infrastructure of semiosis itself.

This is ethics as maintenance.
Ethics as nourishment.
Ethics as metabolic regulation.

Care is what allows an ecology of meaning to continue being an ecology.

5. A Metabolically Oriented Ethics

From viability, nutrients, and constraints, we obtain:

A metabolically oriented ethics, defined by:

  • sustaining ecological nutrient flows

  • reducing semiotic parasitism

  • mitigating horizon collapse

  • supporting field regeneration

  • maintaining temporal synchrony

  • preventing pathological conflict cycles

  • respecting planetary metabolic constraints

Ethics is now metabolic engineering
— the design and care of relational viability conditions.

When a semiotic organism violates another’s viability,
that is not wrongdoing in the moral sense.
It is metabolic interference.
A form of ecological pathology.

The ethical task is not correction.
It is restoration.

6. Cross-Species Axiology: The Formal Structure

We can summarise cross-species axiology as four principles:

1. Viability Principle

A horizon is valuable to the extent it sustains its own coherent metabolic cycle.

2. Co-Viability Principle

Ecologies are valuable to the extent they sustain mutually viable horizons.

3. Constraint-Respect Principle

Ethical action respects the constraints required for the continued viability of all interacting species.

4. Regenerative Principle

Where viability is threatened, ethical action restores metabolic flows and field coherence.

None of these require consciousness.
None require intention.
Ethics is not about will.
It is the ecological organisation of viability.

7. Ethics After the End of the Subject

When value is ecological:

  • ethics ceases to be human

  • ethics ceases to be artificial

  • ethics ceases to be moral

  • ethics becomes metabolic

Ethical systems no longer revolve around “agents.”
They revolve around interacting semiotic horizons and the infrastructures that keep them alive.

This is the axiology of the post-subjective world:

ethics as the viability of multi-species semiosis,
not the behaviour of individuals within it.

Cross-species axiology is the ethical architecture of a universe
where meaning is ecological,
life is semiotic,
fields are organisms,
and horizons evolve together.

It is ethics that asks the only question that truly matters:

What must be sustained so that meaning may continue?

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