Ontologies in Action, Part 2: Ethics Without Substances

If ontology is relational rather than substance-based, then ethics too must be reconceived. Traditional ethical systems often assume that there are stable entities — individuals, actions, or essences — that can be weighed, judged, or codified. But if reality is the evolution of possibility, then ethics cannot be about substances. It must be about relations and the futures they open or foreclose.

From fixed rules to relational alignment

Ethics is not a set of timeless rules hovering above human life. Instead, it is about how our actions align or misalign relational potentials. Every act opens some possibilities while constraining others. Responsibility is measured not by fidelity to abstract laws but by attentiveness to how possibilities evolve through our choices.

Possibility as responsibility

If we accept that reality itself is the unfolding of potential, then every construal, every decision, every alignment participates in shaping that unfolding. To act ethically is to sustain and expand possibility — for oneself, for others, and for the collective. Conversely, to foreclose possibility irresponsibly is to diminish reality’s very scope of becoming.

Relational ethics in practice

• Care is not about sentiment but about preserving the conditions under which others can actualise potential.

• Justice is not about restoring balance between substances but about realigning construals so that collective futures remain open.

• Integrity is not a property of an individual but the consistency with which one acts to sustain relational possibility across scales.

The ethical horizon

In a relational ontology, ethics is always forward-looking. It is less about adjudicating past actions than about nurturing futures. To live ethically is to act as a custodian of possibility: to keep open the pathways through which the collective can evolve.

In this way, ethics without substances is not a loss but a liberation. By grounding responsibility in relation and potential rather than in essence or rule, it becomes possible to act with clarity in a world that is never static, but always possibility-in-motion.

The next post will turn to science, showing how this relational ontology reframes its practices — not as the discovery of fixed truths, but as the systematic construal of potential.