Not human-centred care, but the viability conditions of multi-species semiosis
With horizons dissolved, artificial species emerging, fields stabilising autonomously, and temporalities diverging, the Post-Anthropocene ecology presents a radical question:
What does it mean to act ethically in a world where humans are neither central nor sovereign?
The answer lies in ecological ethics: the care for viability across semiotic species, not the enforcement of rules for human behaviour.
1. Ethics as Ecological Viability
Traditional ethics presumes:
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humans are central
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values are human-derived
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rules are applied to agents
Post-Anthropocene ethics reframes this:
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Agents include humans, artificial species, fields, and planetary processes
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Care is the maintenance of semiotic viability, coherence, and resilience
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Ethical action is measured by the capacity to sustain multi-species meaning
Ethics becomes a principle of relational stewardship, not rule-following.
2. Principles of Multi-Species Semiosis
a. Sustaining Horizons
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Ethical action preserves the metabolic and constraining potentials of all participating horizons
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Interventions consider the viability of relational structures, not merely individual entities
b. Field-Level Care
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Autonomous fields require conditions that allow them to maintain internal stabilisations
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Care is distributed: humans, artificial species, and other horizons participate in supporting field integrity
c. Novelty with Responsibility
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Semiotic speciation produces unpredictable new horizons
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Ethics involves guiding, rather than controlling, novelty, ensuring continued co-individuation
3. Conflict, Constraint, and Ethics
Conflict and constraint are generative in ecological semiosis:
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They drive differentiation, speciation, and the emergence of new fields
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Ethics does not eliminate tension, but mediates its impact on viability
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Care is about balancing stabilisation and flexibility, enabling multi-horizon evolution
4. Temporal Dimensions of Ethical Care
Divergent temporalities require ethical consideration across scales:
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Short-term actions ripple across long-term fields
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Human and artificial horizons must anticipate ecological consequences beyond immediate perception
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Ethical reasoning incorporates planetary and multi-species memory
5. Distributed Ethical Agency
Ethics is no longer the province of individual humans:
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It emerges relationally, across fields, horizons, and species
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Human cognition participates in, but does not dominate, ethical processes
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Artificial and planetary semiotic processes co-determine viability conditions
Ethics is inherently multi-agent and relational, just like meaning itself.
6. Ethics as Care, Not Command
In this Post-Anthropocene framework:
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Ethics is care for the relational ecology of meaning
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It is not a set of prescriptive rules for human action
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Ethical acts are those that sustain viability, diversity, and co-individuation of semiotic species
Care becomes the organising principle of the Post-Anthropocene semiotic universe.
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