If normativity emerges from intelligibility, then ethics is not the application of values or principles to action. Ethics is the local work of sustaining coordination within a shared field of intelligibility. It concerns what must be maintained, repaired, or reconfigured so that action remains mutually inhabitable.
Ethics, on this account, is not about being good. It is about keeping the relational field workable.
1. Why Ethics Does Not Begin with Subjects
Most ethical theories begin with subjects: agents with intentions, beliefs, and responsibilities. From there, they attempt to derive rules or virtues governing interaction. But this gets the order wrong.
Coordination precedes subjects. Before there can be agents who choose, there must already be:
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shared distinctions,
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stabilised expectations,
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and intelligible forms of interaction.
Ethics does not govern subjects acting in a vacuum. It operates within already-coordinated relational fields, where actions can be recognised as fitting, disruptive, careless, or sustaining.
2. Ethical Action as Coordination Maintenance
An action is ethically salient not because it conforms to a rule, but because of what it does to coordination.
Ethical action:
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sustains intelligibility,
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repairs breakdowns,
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or carefully reconfigures constraints when existing patterns no longer hold.
Unethical action is not “wrong” in an abstract sense. It is destabilising — it undermines shared expectations in ways that make continued coordination fragile or impossible.
This is why ethical judgment is so often situational. The same action can stabilise one relational field and fracture another.
3. Responsibility Without Blame
Within this frame, responsibility is not authorship, intention, or culpability. Responsibility is implication.
To act within a relational field is to participate in shaping its conditions of coordination. Responsibility attaches not to motives, but to effects on intelligibility. One is responsible not because one chose freely, but because one’s action contributed to sustaining or disrupting coordination.
Blame becomes secondary. What matters ethically is not who is at fault, but what must be repaired.
4. Ethical Breakdown and Repair
Ethics becomes visible most clearly when coordination fails. Misunderstandings, exclusions, injuries, and silences all signal fractures in intelligibility.
Ethical repair does not consist in punishment or justification. It consists in:
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re-establishing shared distinctions,
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renegotiating expectations,
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or re-cutting the relational field so that coordination can resume.
This is why ethical work is often slow, awkward, and incomplete. Repair is not a return to a prior ideal state; it is a re-stabilisation under new conditions.
5. Why Ethics Is Inherently Local
Because intelligibility is always situated, ethics is inherently local. There is no view from nowhere from which coordination can be judged universally.
This does not entail ethical relativism. Local coordination is constrained by:
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sedimented histories,
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material conditions,
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and broader systems of coordination that impinge on the local field.
Ethical demands arise where coordination is actually at stake, not where abstract principles are violated.
Conclusion
Ethics is not a system of values applied to action. It is the ongoing labour of maintaining coordination within shared fields of intelligibility. Responsibility is participation. Failure is breakdown. Repair is recoordination.
Seen this way, ethics is neither lofty nor optional. It is unavoidable wherever relations must be sustained.
In the next post, we will scale this account outward, examining politics — not as ideology or representation, but as the systemic organisation of constraints that make coordination possible across populations and institutions.
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