Planetary Coordination Without Sovereignty: 9 Toward a Planetary Ethics of Possibility

If there is one illusion that planetary-scale crises have finally shattered, it is the belief that ethics consists in choosing the right outcomes.

At scale, outcomes are not chosen. They emerge.

At scale, control is partial, foresight is bounded, and intention is routinely outrun by coordination effects.

And yet ethics does not disappear.

What changes is what ethics is about.

A planetary ethics cannot be an ethics of ends. It must become an ethics of possibility.

From Outcomes to Conditions

Traditional ethical frameworks ask:

• What should we do?

• What outcome should we aim for?

• What is the right decision?

These questions presuppose a world in which:

• Causal chains are short

• Agency is coherent

• Futures are reasonably predictable

At planetary scale, these presuppositions fail.

A relational ethics therefore shifts its centre of gravity. The ethical question becomes:

What conditions of coordination are we sustaining — and what futures do they make possible or impossible?

Ethics turns upstream.

Possibility as the Ethical Medium

Possibility is not freedom in the abstract. It is not unlimited choice. It is not optimism.

Possibility names the structured openness of a system: the range of futures that can still be actualised without catastrophe, coercion, or collapse.

A planetary ethics asks:

• Where is possibility narrowing silently?

• Where is it being optimised away?

• Where is it being hoarded by a few?

• Where is it being mistaken for chaos?

Ethical action is action that preserves, redistributes, or reopens possibility under constraint.

Why This Is Not a Politics of Indecision

An ethics of possibility is often mistaken for hesitation, relativism, or lack of commitment. This misreading comes from treating decisiveness as an ethical virtue in itself.

At scale, decisiveness without revisability is often unethical.

The ethical task is not to decide once and for all, but to decide in ways that keep further decision possible — especially for those not present, not powerful, not yet born.

This is not indecision.

It is temporal care.

Planetary Ethics Without a Centre

There is no global subject who can carry planetary ethics on their shoulders. No sovereign, no institution, no enlightened elite.

Planetary ethics is necessarily distributed.

It is enacted:

• In standards rather than speeches

• In defaults rather than declarations

• In infrastructures rather than ideologies

• In timing rather than intention

It lives in how systems are designed, coupled, slowed, buffered, and allowed to fail without cascading collapse.

This makes it difficult to see — and easy to ignore.

The Role of Constraint

An ethics of possibility does not oppose constraint. It recognises constraint as inevitable and generative.

The ethical question is not whether to constrain, but:

• Which constraints become irreversible?

• Which constraints are asymmetrically borne?

• Which constraints foreclose learning?

• Which constraints preserve revisability?

Constraint becomes unethical when it masquerades as necessity.

Responsibility Revisited

Responsibility, in this frame, is not about blame or virtue. It is about attunement to coordination effects.

You are responsible insofar as your actions:

• Stabilise a field

• Accelerate a pathway

• Close an option

• Render a future unthinkable

This responsibility is situational, partial, and often uncomfortable. It does not grant moral standing. It does not offer absolution.

It offers only participation with awareness.

Ethics After Hope

A planetary ethics of possibility is not hopeful in the naïve sense. It does not promise that things will turn out well. It does not guarantee progress, justice, or survival.

What it offers instead is fidelity to openness under pressure.

To act such that:

• Collapse does not become destiny

• Stability does not become tyranny

• Coordination does not become domination

This is an ethics for a world where guarantees have expired.

A Different Measure of Success

Success, in this ethics, is quiet and fragile:

• A harmful trajectory slowed just enough to be rethought

• A locked-in system made marginally revisable

• A silenced perspective kept in play

• A future not foreclosed too early

These successes do not announce themselves.

They rarely go viral.

They are often undone.

And yet they matter.

The Final Orientation

A planetary ethics of possibility does not tell us what the world should become.

It asks us to care for the conditions under which becoming remains negotiable.

Not mastery.

Not purity.

Not salvation.

Just the refusal to let the present declare itself inevitable.

That refusal — sustained, distributed, and often unnoticed — may be the most ethical act still available to us.

And it is enough to begin.