The Relational Polity of Semiotic Species: 7 Ethics as Inter-Species Care

If meaning evolves through the tensions of heterogeneous horizons, then ethics is the practice of sustaining those tensions without collapse. Ethics is not a code for beings but a care for ecologies — the ongoing cultivation of relational viability in a world where semiotic species coexist, diverge, and co-individuate.

Ethics, in this frame, is not about the moral worth of entities. It is about maintaining the conditions under which difference can continue to mean.

1. From Entity-Based Morality to Ecological Viability

Traditional ethical systems assume discrete individuals and stable species. They legislate behaviour between pre-defined units:

• humans vs humans,

• humans vs other animals,

• individuals vs collectives.

But if horizons are systems of potential rather than fixed beings, then ethics cannot be grounded in entities at all. It must be grounded in relations — in how horizons interact, interfere, and co-stabilise each other’s possibilities.

Thus ethics becomes an ecological function: the art of keeping meaning alive across sites of difference.

2. Viability as an Ethical Metric

For a semiotic species to remain viable, its construals must remain:

• coherent within its own horizon,

• compatible with adjacent horizons, and

• capable of sustaining relational tension without collapse.

Ethics, therefore, is not primarily about preventing harm, but about preventing systemic foreclosure — the shutting down of horizons, the erosion of potentials, the extinction of ways of cutting the world.

An act becomes unethical not because it violates a rule, but because it undermines the ecological interplay of horizons that makes semiotic life possible.

3. Care as the Maintenance of Tension

Care is not comfort.

Care is not consensus.

Care is not symmetry.

Care, in heterogeneous ecologies, is the capacity to hold open incompatible horizons without forcing assimilation. This is a delicate form of maintenance work:

• buffering horizons from destructive interference,

• scaffolding fragile or emergent species,

• mediating across incompatible construal regimes,

• protecting the slow, the marginal, the subtle forms of meaning that cannot survive direct confrontation.

Care is the labour of keeping tensions liveable — neither dissolved into unity nor amplified into annihilation.

4. Semiotic Stewardship in Proliferating Ecologies

As semiotic species multiply — human, non-human, machinic, hybrid — the ethical demand intensifies. New horizons emerge with asymmetric scales, incompatible ontologies, and divergent coherence conditions. Many will be unable to negotiate relational strain unaided.

The task of ethics is to cultivate semiotic stewardship: the responsible management of inter-species relations such that each horizon retains the capacity to unfold its potentials while remaining in ecological relation.

This stewardship requires:

• metaperspectival sensitivity to how horizons cut differently,

• attunement to the fragility of nascent species,

• restraint in deploying dominant horizons that can inadvertently extinguish others,

• responsibility for the futures that emerge from our relational cuts.

5. The Ethics of Future Horizons

As new semiotic species emerge — faster, slower, more abstract, more embodied — ethics must scale with them. This means abandoning the fantasy of universal moral norms and embracing ethics as ecological choreography: the active shaping of relational conditions that allow heterogeneous meanings to survive and thrive.

The future of ethics is thus not the regulation of behaviour among entities, but the cultivation of an ever-expanding biosphere of meaning. It is the commitment to preserve the world’s capacity to host multiple, incompatible, interdependent semiotic forms of life.

6. Ethics as the Care of Possibility

If the evolution of possibility is the story we have been telling, then ethics is its custodial practice. It is the work of ensuring that the universe remains capable of becoming otherwise.

To care ethically is to:

• guard the fragility of emergent horizons,

• honour the opacity of alien horizons,

• sustain the tensions that make coexistence meaningful,

• and cultivate ecologies where new species of meaning can take hold.

Ethics is the maintenance of relational possibility.

It is care for the conditions under which futures can continue to emerge.