Can a Relational Physics Matter Ethically?

Can a Relational Physics Matter Ethically?

Modern physics has often been read as a story about matter, law, and measurement. But it may also bear on how we understand moral life, the self, and the possibility of meaning.

I have long thought that a relational understanding of physics matters not only for our picture of nature, but also for our picture of ourselves. That claim must still be stated carefully. Physics does not yield morality by deduction, and no symmetry principle can replace ethical judgment. But physics can matter indirectly, by shaping the metaphysical background against which ethical life is understood. If reality is less atomistic than we once believed, then morality and meaning may also have to be thought differently.

I take modern physics to invite a relational understanding of reality. Read in light of thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Weyl, and Carlo Rovelli, the older picture of the world as a collection of fully self-subsistent units no longer seems like the natural default. Cassirer saw objectivity not as the grasp of self-standing substances but as the articulation of lawful functional relations. Weyl, in a closely related spirit, tied objectivity to invariance: what is objective is what remains unchanged under the relevant transformations. Rovelli, in a more explicitly physical register, has argued that the properties of a system are not to be understood as fully absolute, but as determinate only relative to another system. Whatever one makes of the differences between these figures, they converge in weakening the older atomistic imagination.

Again and again, what proves objective in physics is not an isolated thing taken entirely by itself, but a structure that survives transformation: a symmetry, an invariant, a relation preserved across differing descriptions. That does not abolish individuality, and it does not by itself establish a complete ontology. But it does make it harder to think of relation as something merely external, added afterward to independently complete beings.

That shift matters because moral thought is never formed in a metaphysical vacuum. If the self is understood as a sealed center of being, and the other as an entirely separate center, then morality easily appears as something superimposed upon an otherwise indifferent world. Concern for others may still be defended, of course, but it tends to appear as derivative: a product of sentiment, convention, biological adaptation, rational contract, or social necessity. None of these explanations is trivial. But they all leave open a deeper question: is ethical life merely a local arrangement within a reality whose basic structure is indifferent to relation?

A relational view of reality does not answer that question by yielding a moral theorem. But it does alter the field in which the question is asked. If relation belongs not merely to the surface of things but to their deeper constitution, then the self-other distinction may remain real without being metaphysically ultimate. The other is still other; ethics does not depend on dissolving difference into a vague unity. But the other may no longer appear as something wholly external in principle, as though reality were first divided into sealed units and only afterward bridged by moral effort.

This is where the Golden Rule acquires a different significance. “Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself” is not a law of physics. But within a more relational picture of the world, it can appear less metaphysically accidental. By that I mean something quite specific. In an atomistic universe, the primacy of self-concern looks built into the ontology, while concern for others must be added as a secondary achievement. In a relational universe, by contrast, responsiveness to the other does not seem as ontologically out of place. Morality is still not deduced from nature, but neither does it stand quite so starkly as an ethical overlay upon a fundamentally disconnected world.

Of course, the immediate mechanism for such responsiveness is biological rather than purely physical. Human beings, and many other animals, have sufficiently similar nervous systems that pain, fear, relief, and comfort are not mysterious private abstractions. No one experiences a nail through the foot as pleasant. A hard materialist can say all this too, and should. But biology alone does not settle the metaphysical issue. One may still say: yes, other beings suffer, but why should that matter beyond contingent sympathy, evolved cooperation, or practical coordination? The contribution of a relational worldview, if it has one, lies here. It does not generate compassion, but it can make compassion appear less like a fortunate anomaly in an otherwise disconnected universe.

The same bears on the question of meaning. Within a strict materialist picture, life is easily understood as the outcome of ontologically blind processes: local adaptations, temporary configurations of matter, brief pockets of inwardness arising in a universe that is in itself devoid of significance. That picture has a certain austerity, and for many it carries intellectual force. But one may still ask whether such austerity is the final word, or whether it reflects a metaphysic that has grown too accustomed to separateness.

A relational universe does not guarantee meaning. It does not abolish suffering, chance, or tragedy. Nor does relation as such automatically amount to meaning; a universe of pure structure could still be imagined as cold or indifferent. But it does make another thought more available: that reality is not indifferent all the way down. If what is most fundamental is not sheer separateness but relation, structure, and mutual implication, then meaning need not be conceived as a merely local illusion produced by nervous systems on the surface of an otherwise empty cosmos. It may instead belong, however obscurely, to the world’s deeper intelligibility.

This is one reason I find it possible to be religious without being religious in the ordinary sense. By that I do not mean vaguely spiritual, nor the decorative reuse of theological language after conviction has drained out of it. I mean something more exact: that one may seek depth, orientation, and intelligible wholeness without beginning from revelation, sacred text, or institutional authority. For some minds, intuition is sufficient. For others, intuition must also become thinkable. I belong to the second kind. I need the intellect not to destroy depth, but to make room for it without self-deception.

In that sense, a relational reading of physics offers no creed. It offers no salvation story, no moral code, no finished metaphysics. But it does resist one powerful modern habit: the assumption that reality is fundamentally made of disconnected units, and that ethics and meaning are therefore secondary projections cast upon a world indifferent to both. If that assumption weakens, something else becomes possible. Not certainty, but a different orientation. And that may already be a significant consequence.

References

1. Michael Friedman, Ernst Cassirer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/
2. J. L. Bell, Hermann Weyl, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weyl/
3. Symmetry and Symmetry Breaking, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/
4. Relational Quantum Mechanics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/
5. Carlo Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 35 (1996): 1637–1678.
6. James Ladyman, Structural Realism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/