Synopsis
Continuity Ethics proposes a third foundation for moral obligation. Justice ethics begins from equality and reciprocal rights; traditional care ethics begins from vulnerability and need. Continuity Ethics begins from mutual subjectivity. Every person remains a subject with agency and an object within other people’s perceptual fields. That condition creates reciprocal, though unequal, risks. Obligations scale according to power, proximity, and the capacity to recognize the Other as a subject.
The problem it responds to
Many moral frameworks struggle with relationships that are neither equal nor cleanly divided into caregiver and dependent. Parent and child, institution and citizen, employer and worker, and intimate partners all remain subjects while holding unequal power and different capacities to affect one another.
What the work contributes
- Preserves agency on both sides of an asymmetric relationship.
- Explains why power increases obligation without making vulnerability a permanent identity.
- Distinguishes maintaining a person’s continuity from affirming harmful beliefs or behavior.
- Frames care as ecological stability within a relational network rather than charitable protection from above.
Development
- Extends the argument first stated in Continuity of the Subjective Experience.
- Supplies the ethical foundation for Promirational Ethics.
- Uses the RPCM to describe how obligation varies across relational conditions.
Keywords