Against Ethical Capture: Toward a Living Insurrection of the Sensible

Sunday, April 6, 2025

Abstract:
This article denounces the structural corruption of institutional ethics as it is taught, certified, and practiced. It argues that contemporary ethics—especially within academic and professional domains—has been subsumed into the machinery it claims to regulate. Rooted in normative ideals such as justice, beneficence, and procedural fairness, institutional ethics now functions as a symbolic varnish over fundamentally unethical systems. The text calls instead for a radical reactivation of ethics as a living, situated, and metamorphic practice—one that does not aim to stabilize, but to disturb, listen, and transform.

Institutional ethics does not protect life.
It manages it.

Under the guise of care, it categorizes.
Under the mask of justice, it adjudicates according to norms it never dares to deconstruct.
Under the name of beneficence, it decides who should be saved, who should be silenced, who should be sacrificed.

The ethics currently taught in graduate programs—whether in medicine, business, research, or technology—functions not as a tool for emancipation, but as a bureaucratic anesthesia.
It trains individuals to evaluate complex, often violent systems using predefined moral rubrics.
It certifies “ethical experts” who will operate within the very institutions that produce structural harm:
multinational corporations, surveillance systems, carceral medicine, extractive research, humanitarian industries built on the suffering of others.

In these contexts, ethics becomes a retroactive justification.
It does not prevent the violation.
It arrives after.
It writes the report.
It ensures compliance.
It maintains the frame.

This is not ethics.
This is capture.

Because real ethics is not a protocol.
It is not a method.
It is not a checklist.

Real ethics is a frequency.
A disruption.
A trembling in the presence of another being.

It begins in the body.
In the silences that precede decision.
In the refusal to act without listening.
In the courage to suspend all scripts—especially those that call themselves “ethical.”

The kind of ethics that must now be activated is not rooted in universalizable principles.
It is intimate, fractal, destabilizing.
It does not aim to resolve dilemmas.
It aims to reopen the question of what it means to be human.

It is not the ethics of institutions.
It is the ethics of encounter.

And that ethics can only be practiced by those who are willing to live it,
not apply it.
To vibrate with it,
not theorize it from a distance.

To be transformed by it,
not rewarded for enforcing it.

This is not a call for reform.
It is a rupture.

Let the symbolic structures fall.
Let the certified experts return their titles.

Let us begin again—
with silence,
presence,
and a love so real
it refuses to be managed.