Ethics as Ontogenetic Fields

The Orienting of Coordination

Ethics as Formative Force

Ethics is often reduced to a regulatory overlay, rules to follow, imperatives to obey, guidelines that restrain desire or impulse in the name of some greater good. In this model, ethics stands outside of life as a system of evaluation applied to otherwise free behavior. Yet this framing misses something essential. It treats ethics as something that comes after, as post hoc reasoning rather than constitutive structure. But what if ethics is not a mere addendum to life, not a top-down injunction, but an ontogenetic field, a shaping environment within which action, sense, and relation take form?

To speak of ontogeny is to speak of the genesis of form, the way structures emerge, differentiate, and become patterned over time. Ontogenetic fields are the subtle architectures that condition this emergence. They are not fixed templates but dynamic gradients of force that guide development from within. In this view, ethics is not simply a discourse or doctrine, but an internal feature of coordination. It is embedded in the very ways that attention moves, that desires are oriented, and that agency becomes intelligible to itself and others. Ethics, then, is not something we apply to life. It is something through which life comes to be lived as meaningful, as responsible, as shared.

This reframing opens a powerful analytic pathway. If we understand ethics as an ontogenetic field, we can begin to trace how ethical sensibilities are encoded in the infrastructures of coordination itself, how values are patterned into perception, habituated into behavior, and transmitted across generations through cultural, affective, and symbolic means. Ethics becomes not a commandment but a coordination of perception, orientation, and consequence.

The Infoscape and the Encoding of Ethical Memeforms

All ethical systems emerge within what can be called the infoscape, the total environment of shared meaning, signification, and symbolic exchange that permeates a culture or context. The infoscape is not simply a field of information. It is a topological field of attention, recognition, and resonance. It includes language, stories, images, metaphors, norms, and myths. These elements are not passive representations; they are active participants in shaping what becomes thinkable, feelable, and actionable within a society.

Within the infoscape, certain units of meaning gain coherence, mobility, and reproductive power and the vital attribute of being internalizable. These are memeforms, which are structured, transmissible packets of orientation. Memeforms are more than slogans or cultural phrases. They are pattern-carriers. They hold within them compressed instructions for how to perceive a situation, how to frame an action, how to anticipate a consequence. Ethical memeforms are those that encode evaluations of right and wrong, harm and care, justice and obligation.

These forms do not circulate neutrally. They attract affective charge. They resonate with pre-existing patterns of value. For instance, the memeform “do no harm” is not simply an instruction. It is a perceptual lens that organizes experience around harm as the salient moral category. It causes harm to be seen, anticipated, and avoided. Another memeform like “the ends justify the means” flips the axis of evaluation, emphasizing consequences over immediate actions. Such memeforms orient how one interprets events and judges others. They move through culture not just via media or education, but through rituals, stories, punishments, and shared acts of recognition.

Importantly, memeforms embed ethics not by argument but by resonance. They simplify complex relational logics into transferable structures that feel intuitive. This affective resonance is what allows ethical systems to reproduce even when their rational justifications are forgotten or contested. The encoding of ethics into memeforms is the first layer of ontogenetic inscription, it renders values transmissible as patterned units within the broader infoscape.

Internalization Architecture and Ethical Habituation

However, memeforms do not exert ethical influence solely by circulating. They must be internalized. This occurs through what we can call internalization architectures, the layered and interdependent mechanisms by which external forms are absorbed into embodied cognition, affective response, and behavioral readiness.

Internalization is not simply an intellectual process. It is not the acceptance of a proposition, but the embodiment of a pattern. A child does not learn fairness by hearing a definition. They learn it through experiences of distribution, through emotional consequences of perceived injustice, and through repeated reinforcement of sharing behaviors. Memeforms that convey ethics become part of the internal structure of perception through such repetition, affective salience, and social anchoring.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is particularly helpful here. Habitus refers to the sedimentation of social norms and patterns into the body and mind, forming a kind of embodied orientation to the world (Bourdieu, 1977). Memeforms that convey ethics, once internalized, contribute to a moral habitus, a background structure that inclines individuals toward certain forms of action, judgment, and self-understanding without needing to be consciously invoked.

This architecture is deeply shaped by environment. Families, schools, religious institutions, and peer groups act as sites of ethical internalization, each with their own strategies of reinforcement, punishment, modeling, and emotional attunement. Over time, individuals come to respond ethically not because they consult rules, but because their capacity to see and feel is shaped by internalized fields of value. Ethics becomes an orientation rather than a calculation.

Thread Saturation and Affordance Structures

In the Coordination as Power framework, action is understood as occurring through threads, irreducible acts of coordination that bind individuals, objects, and intentions into shared trajectories. Each thread is shaped by who initiates it, who is included, how decisions flow, what the scope of coordination is, and how participants internalize its patterns. When ethical memeforms become saturated into these threads, they influence not just what actions are taken but what actions become conceivable or desirable.

Affordance structures emerge within these threads. Affordances are the latent possibilities for action that a given environment offers to a given agent. For example, a sidewalk affords walking, but it does not afford swimming. In ethical terms, affordances shape the perceived landscape of moral response. A utilitarian field of coordination affords quantitative assessment of outcomes; it makes cost-benefit reasoning appear natural. An ethics of care affords attentiveness and responsiveness; it renders emotional attunement and relational labor as viable forms of moral action.

Affordances are not objective properties. They are relational. They emerge from the interaction between internalized ethical architecture and external field conditions. When threads become saturated with certain ethical memeforms, they amplify specific affordances and render others inert. This is how ethical systems become environments of action rather than external constraints on them.

Feedback Loops and Symbolic Anchoring

Ethical fields are not stable by default. They require feedback to maintain coherence. Feedback loops are the dynamic processes through which ethical actions are reinforced or corrected, whether through praise, punishment, institutional response, or emotional consequence. These loops stabilize ethical perception by linking action to outcome in ways that confirm or adjust internalization.

Symbolic anchoring plays a critical role here. Symbols are concentrated forms of meaning that can condense complex ethical fields into recognizable forms. A national flag, a courtroom bench, and a religious icon each act as an anchor that ties ethical behavior to broader narratives of legitimacy, authority, or collective identity.

These anchors serve to stabilize ethical memeforms within cultural memory. They provide continuity across contexts and help translate abstract principles into shared expectations. When someone kneels in protest during a national anthem, the act is not ethically neutral. It confronts a symbolic anchor and generates powerful feedback loops, both affirming and condemning. The feedback, in turn, reshapes the symbolic field, altering the ontogenetic terrain of coordination.

Interactive Dynamics and Ethical Co-formation

While much of ethical internalization appears as passive absorption, ethical fields are also constituted through active interaction. The face of the other, in Levinas’ terms, confronts the self with an unignorable claim (Levinas, 1969). The experience of care, harm, solidarity, or betrayal does not simply reinforce existing ethical structures, it can rupture them, force their reconfiguration, or inaugurate new ones.

These interactive dynamics are the sites of ethical co-formation. Through dialogue, conflict, mutual aid, or protest, individuals and groups renegotiate the shape of ethical fields. This means that ethics is not merely inherited or imposed. It is co-produced in the dynamic space between internalization and improvisation, between structure and encounter.

In moments of rupture or transformation, we see the ontogenetic field shift. New memeforms emerge. Old ones lose traction. Feedback loops reorient. Coordination patterns evolve. Ethical systems are thus always both historical and emergent.

Core Components of Ethical Systems

Despite their historical and cultural variation, ethical systems tend to be structured around a shared set of core components. These include the source of moral value (e.g., utility, care, virtue), the method of evaluation (e.g., outcome-based, relational, dispositional), the locus of moral responsibility (e.g., individual, relational, collective), the temporal orientation of moral judgment (e.g., past precedent, present need, future consequence), and the symbolic language through which ethics is made communicable.

Utilitarianism derives value from aggregate well-being. Its method of evaluation is consequentialist, actions are good if they increase overall utility. Responsibility is generalized and depersonalized; each individual must consider the widest possible scope of impact. Time is future-oriented, projecting possible outcomes. Its symbolic language tends toward metrics, balance sheets, and hypothetical scenarios (Mill, 1863).

The ethics of care, by contrast, grounds value in relationship. Evaluation centers on attentiveness, responsiveness, and the sustenance of connection. Responsibility is contextual and interpersonal, emerging from proximity and vulnerability. Temporality is recursive and present-focused, emphasizing continuity of care rather than calculable outcomes (Tronto, 1993).

Virtue ethics orients moral value around the cultivation of character. Evaluation hinges on internal dispositions rather than isolated actions. Responsibility lies in the individual’s developmental arc toward flourishing, often guided by cultural exemplars. Time is cyclical and teleological, virtue unfolds through practice, repetition, and imitation over a lifetime (Aristotle, 2009).

Each system, through its core components, configures a different ethical field. These configurations are not neutral. They exert power.

Power Dynamics in Ethical Fields

Every ethical system is also a distribution of power. Utilitarianism, for example, empowers those who possess the tools of calculation, prediction, and control. It privileges a bird’s-eye view of social systems and renders certain kinds of moral reasoning legitimate while marginalizing others. Those who cannot demonstrate their suffering through data, or whose lives do not yield measurable benefit, may be structurally excluded from moral consideration. Optimization can become a mask for domination (Sen, 2009).

The ethics of care redistributes power by centering the relational, the proximate, and the vulnerable. It resists abstraction and insists on the irreducibility of situated responsibility. Yet this framework can also naturalize caregiving roles, disproportionately placing moral and emotional labor on women, parents, or marginalized communities. It inverts the hierarchies of rationalist ethics but can entrench its own (Gilligan, 1982).

Virtue ethics invests power in character formation. It elevates those who embody culturally sanctioned virtues and participate in traditional forms of excellence. But such traditions often reflect dominant class, gender, or racial norms. The cultivation of virtue can thus become a tool of social reproduction, preserving existing power structures under the guise of moral education (MacIntyre, 1981).

Ethical fields, therefore, are not only systems of coordination. They are terrains of stratification and contestation. To understand ethics ontogenetically is to see how power flows not merely through institutions or commands, but through the shaping of perception, relation, and agency at the level of everyday coordination.

Conclusion: Ethics as the Orienting of Life

To say that ethics is an ontogenetic field is to recognize that ethical life is not built atop a neutral ground. It is built through the patterns of meaning, memory, and affect that render life intelligible as moral in the first place. Ethics shapes how we see, whom we attend to, what consequences we imagine, and how we coordinate with others toward futures we may not fully understand.

Ethical systems are not finished structures. They are living architectures, sensitive to history, saturated with affect, and animated through interaction. By tracing their encoding in the infoscape, their internalization in habitus, their saturation in threads, and their feedback dynamics, we come to see ethics not as a prescription but as a process.

We live through ethics not because we obey it, but because it orients us, forming the very conditions through which action becomes possible, intelligible, and meaningful. In this way, ethics is not merely about what we ought to do. It is about how we come to be, together.

References

Aristotle. (2009). Nicomachean Ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press.

Mill, J. S. (1863). Utilitarianism. Parker, Son, and Bourn.

Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Harvard University Press.

Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care. Routledge.