relational normativity

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Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Relational normativity is the demand to evaluate which relations are composed, sustained or transformed according to their consequences for beings and their possibilities of flourishing. RB2 develops Haraway’s warning that relation is basic without therefore being good. The proposal distinguishes ethical discrimination among relations from the ontological fact of dependence, sheer network connectivity or approval of any arrangement that happens to persist.

Explanation

The defining discussion identifies histories, asymmetries and regimes of extraction as reasons relations differ in moral and political consequence. Normativity therefore concerns the kind of relation and its effects, not simply increasing contact or preserving an existing network. Dependence can enable life while also making participants vulnerable to domination.

AB distinguishes real goods from historically enacted values, leaving communities capable of tracking those goods better or worse. Its care example makes judgment responsive to a particular life rather than one universal delivery arrangement. The proposal retains fallible ethical inquiry without treating survival or local consensus as a sufficient moral verdict.

PB explicitly flags that answerability and the bindingness of its imperative are not theorems. RB3 similarly presents trajectories and regimes as objects of ethical judgment. These comparisons preserve the additional normative commitment rather than claiming the duty follows automatically from category theory, physical interconnection or a description of how systems endure.

Scope and attribution

Keep the normative addition and situated consequence-based judgment explicit.

AB — The Actual Book

Goods and enacted values require fallible judgment in particular lives.

Occurrence locators: 178, 181.

PB — The Possible Book

Binding ethical answerability is explicitly not a theorem.

Occurrence locators: 155, 156.

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

Haraway’s filter distinguishes consequences from the mere existence of relations.

Occurrence locators: 193, 194, 207.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Regimes and trajectories require normative evaluation.

Occurrence locators: 207, 208.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Evaluating relations by their consequences is distinguished from the broader real-goods/enacted-values distinction.