The ethical implications of PRO (Pure Relational Ontology) arise directly from its ontological and epistemological foundations. Since PRO begins with material reality, acknowledges that all knowledge and language arise from experience, and demands truthfulness in correspondence to that reality, its ethics are grounded, non-idealistic, and action-based. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Ethics Follows Ontology and Language

Reality precedes experience, and experience precedes knowledge and language. Ethics is not abstract or imposed from above (e.g., divine, ideal, rational), but emerges from how one navigates these layers. Ethics in PRO is the correspondence between reality, thought, speech, and action. Therefore, truthful thinking, truthful speaking, and truthful acting are core ethical principles.

2. Anti-reification as Ethical Practice

PRO insists on minimal and transparent reification. Abstract entities are not “real” in themselves but are metaphorically constructed. To act ethically is to speak and think with awareness of reification, and avoid confusing the map (language/symbol) for the territory (reality). Misleading through abstraction—intentionally or not—is an ethical failure.

3. Material Commitment and Responsibility

Because all that exists is materially grounded, every ethical action must take account of the real-world consequences on actual beings (not fictions). Ethical action is not about aligning with ideals but aligning speech and action to reality as experienced and understood.

4. Situated Agent Responsibility

The speaker (external agent) is responsible for the act of expression. Ethics, then, includes the responsibility of casting: how one chooses to frame a situation, assign agency, and describe relations in a sentence, metaphor, or discourse. Every sentence is a moral act, insofar as it is a choice of perspective and relation.

5. No Universal Ethical Ideals

PRO rejects transcendental ethics. Ethics must be grounded in situated, embodied, experiential contexts. However, this is not relativism: truth still matters, but it is contextual, embodied, and materially-based.

6. Action-Based Ethics

PRO culminates in ethics as action: not what we think or say alone, but how we live and act in the world, in light of our understanding of reality and our symbolic expressions. Ethical life is continuous alignment across experience, knowledge, speech, and action.

Summary in One Line:

To live ethically in PRO is to speak and act truthfully, with awareness of how our concepts and words shape reality, and with responsibility to the material world they refer to.