ethics of becoming

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

An ethics of becoming evaluates the shared worlds that actions and institutions help stabilize, asking whether plural lives retain viability, participatory agency and revisability. It treats regimes and their enabling conditions as ethical objects alongside particular deeds. Its commitment to sustaining beings who can be harmed is explicit; descriptions of change alone do not supply a morality.

Explanation

AB develops this orientation through care, institutional failure and the difference between declared values and the worlds their enactment produces. It rejects the thought that more relation is inherently better: coercion and mutual aid can both be intensely relational. Trust and care count as moral goods only within the wider test of a shareable, revisable world.

PB states the commitment in its Manifesto and Tractatus. Its earlier ecological essay and its literary experiments retain their separate voices and historical formulations; they are not flattened into a single timeless doctrine. RB2 likewise says that participation becomes consequential while evaluation requires further premises.

RB3 develops the stance as Enactive Ecosophy, combining real goods with historically enacted values and practical reconstruction. Designing a complete final order is explicitly refused: ordinary ethical agency needs institutions capable of learning, repair and revision.

Scope and attribution

AB/PB/RB3 offer substantive formulations; RB2 offers a qualified ethical transition. RB1’s inherited interdisciplinary introduction is orientation rather than a developed definition.

AB — The Actual Book

Regime evaluation is anchored in an explicit commitment and the tests of viability, participation and revision.

Occurrence locators: 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 181, 182, 185, 191; Notes: 247, 248; Appendix: 279.

PB — The Possible Book

Manifesto and Tractatus articulate world-making ethics; the earlier ecology essay remains historically distinct.

Occurrence locators: 37, 38, 63, 105.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

The concluding ethical orientation makes evaluative premises additional to the consequences of an open ontology.

Occurrence locators: 295, 296.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Enactive Ecosophy develops regime-level evaluation, real goods, enacted values and revisable design.

Occurrence locators: 190, 205, 209, 210, 211, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 231, 252, 258, 264, 266, 267, 297, 300, 301, 308, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320.

Background used in the editorial explanation

PB’s earlier ecocentrist program (p.202, source note p.205) is preserved as historical background, separately from the later explicitly qualified ethics of becoming.