The concept of “normal” is often invoked with an air of self-evidence, as if it reflects an objective, value-neutral baseline for behavior, identity, or belief. Yet this presumption belies the deeply constructed nature of normalcy itself. Far from being a mere descriptive term, “normal” operates as a normative force: a social prescription masquerading as common sense. What is deemed normal is rarely accidental; it is the outcome of intersecting regimes of power that encode dominant values into the fabric of everyday life. These regimes operate across multiple domains—legal, medical, educational, familial, and cultural—embedding themselves within the institutions that shape subjectivities and reinforce hegemonic standards. Normalcy, in this light, is not a passive reflection of social consensus, but an active production of it.[1]
As Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopower and disciplinary mechanisms reveal, power in modernity is not limited to acts of repression, prohibition, or direct coercion. Rather, it operates in a more insidious and productive manner. Power, according to Foucault, is generative: it produces knowledge, shapes subjectivities, and organizes the very conditions under which life is lived.[2] It configures bodies, not only by disciplining them through institutions such as prisons, schools, hospitals, and the military, but also by regulating gestures, habits, and movements in ways that become internalized by individuals.[3] Time is structured through schedules, routines, and temporal expectations that are naturalized, creating rhythms that govern social life without the need for overt enforcement.
This form of power distributes intelligibility—that is, it determines which forms of life, behavior, and identity are recognizable within the dominant epistemological frameworks. It configures desire, not only by limiting what can be desired, but by shaping the very horizons of desirability.[4] The norm, then, is not simply a standard to be measured against or a rule to be obeyed. It becomes a criterion for legibility: a way of making certain lives visible, coherent, and worthy of recognition, while rendering others opaque, unintelligible, or even disposable.
Through techniques such as surveillance, normalization, and internalization, individuals come to govern themselves in accordance with these norms. They become both the subjects of power—those upon whom it acts—and its agents, participating in their own regulation. This is not simply a matter of obedience to external authority, but a more intimate and recursive form of control, wherein individuals police their own bodies, thoughts, and behaviors, often without conscious awareness.
What results is a form of power that is diffuse, decentralized, and deeply embedded in everyday life. It does not reside solely in the state or in identifiable institutions but circulates through myriad practices, discourses, and technologies that shape what people come to see as possible, permissible, or desirable. The “normal” thus becomes a site of subtle coercion—not enforced by violence, but by the quiet force of conformity, expectation, and self-surveillance. In this way, Foucault’s evocative formulation of “the soul as the prison of the body”[5] captures the paradox of modern power: it is not only exercised upon the body, but through the soul—through consciousness, identity, and the desire to be recognized as normal, good, or successful within a given order.
The entanglement of normalcy with power carries profound ethical consequences, reshaping the very conditions under which moral life is lived and moral claims are made. When a specific way of being—rooted in dominant social, cultural, or political ideals—is elevated to the status of “normal,” it does more than describe a statistical average or behavioral preference. It becomes a normative imperative: a standard against which all other lives are measured, judged, and often found wanting. In this context, normalcy does not merely reflect what is; it dictates what ought to be.
As a result, alternative ways of living—those that diverge from the sanctioned template—are not just seen as different, but as defective, dangerous, or morally suspect. Queer identities, neurodivergent modes of cognition, non-Western cosmologies, and non-capitalist lifeways, for example, are frequently pathologized not because of any inherent harm they pose, but because they transgress the unspoken boundaries of what society has naturalized as proper or good.[6] Deviance, then, becomes less about behavior and more about ontology—about who one is permitted to be.
Within this schema, morality is less a space for open-ended inquiry or reflective deliberation than a system of pre-authorized conclusions. It operates through inherited scripts, received wisdom, and socially sanctioned outcomes. The moral imagination is constrained by what is already legible within the dominant order. Rather than encouraging unique engagement with the complexities of human experience, normative morality simplifies and flattens. It forces moral life into rigid binaries: normal/abnormal, good/bad, natural/unnatural, sane/insane. These binaries function less as outcomes of critical reasoning than as effects of social conditioning—manufactured through educational systems, media narratives, religious dogma, and the internalized expectations of family and community.
Such categories are not neutral. They are saturated with power. They carry with them the force of normativity, the weight of judgment, and the risk of exclusion. They determine not only what is deemed morally acceptable, but also who is recognized as a moral subject at all. Those who fall outside the bounds of normalcy are often denied full moral agency, either infantilized, criminalized, or erased altogether. Their experiences are rendered unintelligible within dominant ethical frameworks, making it difficult to even articulate dissent without being dismissed as irrational, immoral, or mad.
In this way, ethics—when tethered to the tyranny of normalcy—ceases to be a dynamic process of grappling with complexity and becomes instead a kind of moral programming.[7] It operates like an algorithm, where judgment is pre-coded and outcomes are predetermined. Ambiguity, contradiction, and transformation—the lifeblood of ethical growth—are pushed to the margins. Dissent is reframed as deviance, and moral creativity is suppressed in favor of conformity.
What is lost in this arrangement is not only the richness of human diversity but also the potential for ethical transformation. When the boundaries of the moral are drawn too tightly, we lose the capacity to imagine other ways of living, other modes of flourishing, and other futures worth striving for. Resisting the conflation of normalcy with morality is thus not merely a theoretical concern—it is an ethical imperative. It requires us to reopen the space of ethics to the unfamiliar, the unstable, and the previously unthinkable, and to recover morality as a living, contested, and radically inclusive practice.[8]
The consequence is an ethical monoculture: a rigid and self-reinforcing system in which divergent moral intuitions, alternative epistemologies, and subversive life practices are not merely sidelined but actively rendered unintelligible within dominant frameworks of meaning. In such a landscape, moral difference does not appear as a legitimate variation to be engaged with, but as an anomaly to be corrected, pathologized, or erased. The multiplicity of ethical worlds—shaped by different histories, cosmologies, affective registers, and material conditions—is flattened into a singular narrative of what it means to live rightly, think clearly, or act justly.[9]
This foreclosure on ethical diversity does more than marginalize—it narrows the horizons of moral imagination itself. It stunts our collective capacity to conceive of alternative ways of being, relating, and responding to the world. Possibility is constrained not by the limits of human creativity, but by the parameters of the norm, which silently circumscribe what can be recognized as valid, desirable, or even conceivable. The moral field becomes one of repetition rather than invention, surveillance rather than solidarity, assimilation rather than pluralism.[10]
The norm, in this sense, becomes not just a descriptive average but a prescriptive boundary. It determines the grammar of ethical discourse—the range of what can be said, thought, or felt without transgressing the invisible borders of acceptability. That which falls outside this grammar is not simply rejected; it is rendered inarticulate, unspeakable, unthinkable. Entire lifeways, ways of knowing, and practices of care may thus exist in silence—not because they lack depth or legitimacy, but because the dominant moral order has no place to register them.[11]
In such a system, to imagine otherwise is not merely difficult—it is, in many cases, impermissible. The very act of envisioning an alternative can be met with suspicion, derision, or punishment. Radical empathy, decolonial thought, queer kinship structures, communal economies, or ecological ethics rooted in interdependence may be dismissed as naive, irrational, or dangerous—not due to any inherent flaw, but because they exceed the sanctioned boundaries of what ethics is allowed to be. Moral innovation becomes a site of risk.[12]
What results is not ethical clarity but ethical enclosure. A system that prides itself on universal principles ends up enforcing conformity through epistemic violence and affective regulation. It disciplines not only bodies and behaviors, but also desires, dreams, and dissents. It produces docile moral subjects—those who can recite the right ethical codes but have lost the ability to question the architecture of those codes themselves.[13]
To resist this ethical monoculture is to reclaim imagination as a political and moral act. It is to insist that ethics must be capacious enough to hold contradiction, conflict, and complexity—that it must make room for the marginalized, the fugitive, and the not-yet-thinkable. Such a reclamation does not merely broaden the scope of moral discourse; it reanimates ethics as a living, breathing practice of worldmaking.
Yet cracks in this edifice appear in moments of rupture—those rare, often disorienting junctures when the smooth surface of the normative order is fractured, revealing the scaffolding beneath. Personal crises, political upheavals, collective traumas, or epistemic breaks can function as catalysts that interrupt the taken-for-granted flow of ethical life. These events do not simply destabilize individual convictions; they unsettle the very frameworks through which morality has been perceived, practiced, and policed. What once felt eternal, self-evident, or divinely ordained is suddenly thrown into question.[14]
In these moments, the naturalized coherence of the normative order begins to unravel. The narratives that once undergirded identity, duty, value, and justice lose their persuasive grip. What is revealed in the disorientation is not a descent into moral chaos or nihilism, as defenders of the dominant order often fear, but a space of radical ethical potential. The rupture exposes the contingent and constructed nature of moral norms—not as timeless truths but as historically situated artifacts, shaped by power, circumstance, and human labor.
This revelation marks a turning point. Ethics is no longer seen as a matter of discovering pre-existing moral laws written into the fabric of the universe or dictated by some transcendent authority. Instead, it becomes a creative and collaborative process—an act of negotiation, contestation, and reinvention. Moral truth, in this frame, is not something we find; it is something we make together, through shared struggle, vulnerability, and imagination.
To stand in the wake of rupture is to inhabit a liminal space: one foot in a crumbling moral order, the other reaching toward an as-yet-unrealized ethical horizon. It is here, amid uncertainty and exposure, that new forms of responsibility and relation can begin to emerge. The collapse of certainty does not foreclose ethical life—it intensifies it. No longer shielded by the illusion of moral absolutes, individuals and communities are called to a deeper, more attentive form of ethical engagement—one that resists closure, embraces complexity, and honors difference.
Rupture, then, is not merely a breakdown but a breakthrough. It makes possible the reconfiguration of ethical life on more pluralistic, situated, and emancipatory grounds. It is in these moments—when the normative order loses its aura of inevitability—that we catch a glimpse of what freedom might mean: not the absence of norms, but the capacity to participate in their ongoing reimagining.
This realization invites not just a reconsideration of moral content, but a fundamental ethical reorientation—one that refuses the notion of morality as a closed, static system of rules and instead embraces ethics as a dynamic, open-ended praxis. It signals a shift from morality as adjudication to ethics as creation; from rule-following to worldmaking. In this view, ethics is no longer the rote application of preordained principles to discrete situations, but a lived, felt, and evolving practice—shaped in real time through our entanglements with others, our responsiveness to context, and our ongoing efforts to live meaningfully in a world marked by difference, vulnerability, and change.
Rather than striving for detached objectivity or timeless universality, this ethical orientation foregrounds the particular, the embodied, and the relational. It understands that ethical life does not unfold in the abstract, but in the granular details of everyday encounters—within specific histories, material conditions, cultural inheritances, and affective economies. Here, to act ethically is not to appeal to a universal code, but to listen, to sense, to respond. It requires an openness to ambiguity and an attentiveness to how power, privilege, and precarity shape both our choices and the stakes of those choices.
In this mode, ethics privileges responsiveness over prescription. It values dialogical engagement over authoritative decree, and attunement over abstraction. Ethical deliberation becomes less about arriving at definitive answers and more about cultivating the capacities—patience, humility, discernment, courage—that allow us to navigate complexity with care. It is a practice of staying with the trouble, of lingering in uncertainty without rushing to closure.
Such an ethics is inherently improvisational. It resembles a dance more than a calculation—a continual negotiation within shifting fields of power, perspective, and possibility. The aim is not to conform to a predetermined moral form but to remain sensitively engaged with what the moment asks of us, and with who we are becoming in the process. It invites us to think with, rather than think over; to co-create meaning rather than impose it.
This orientation does not dispense with norms altogether, but it treats them as provisional and revisable, rather than eternal and absolute. It recognizes that what counts as “right” or “just” is always already situated—historically, culturally, politically—and that ethics, to remain alive, must remain in motion. It must be responsive to the emerging needs of our time, including the needs of those who have been historically excluded from moral consideration altogether.
To embrace ethics as praxis is to understand that the ethical is not something we arrive at, but something we inhabit, cultivate, and co-construct. It is less a destination than a mode of being-with—an ongoing practice of becoming accountable to ourselves, to others, and to the more-than-human worlds we are part of. It is in this open-endedness that ethics finds its vitality—not in certainty, but in its capacity to generate new ways of being, relating, and imagining otherwise.[15]
This realization invites not just a reconsideration of moral content, but a fundamental ethical reorientation—one that refuses the notion of morality as a closed, static system of rules and instead embraces ethics as a dynamic, open-ended praxis. It signals a shift from morality as adjudication to ethics as creation; from rule-following to worldmaking. In this view, ethics is no longer the rote application of preordained principles to discrete situations, but a lived, felt, and evolving practice—shaped in real time through our entanglements with others, our responsiveness to context, and our ongoing efforts to live meaningfully in a world marked by difference, vulnerability, and change.[16]
Rather than striving for detached objectivity or timeless universality, this ethical orientation foregrounds the particular, the embodied, and the relational. It understands that ethical life does not unfold in the abstract, but in the granular details of everyday encounters—within specific histories, material conditions, cultural inheritances, and affective economies. Here, to act ethically is not to appeal to a universal code, but to listen, to sense, to respond. It requires an openness to ambiguity and an attentiveness to how power, privilege, and precarity shape both our choices and the stakes of those choices.
In this mode, ethics privileges responsiveness over prescription. It values dialogical engagement over authoritative decree, and attunement over abstraction. Ethical deliberation becomes less about arriving at definitive answers and more about cultivating the capacities—patience, humility, discernment, courage—that allow us to navigate complexity with care. It is a practice of staying with the trouble, of lingering in uncertainty without rushing to closure.
Such an ethics is inherently improvisational. It resembles a dance more than a calculation—a continual negotiation within shifting fields of power, perspective, and possibility. The aim is not to conform to a predetermined moral form but to remain sensitively engaged with what the moment asks of us, and with who we are becoming in the process. It invites us to think with, rather than think over; to co-create meaning rather than impose it.
This orientation does not dispense with norms altogether, but it treats them as provisional and revisable, rather than eternal and absolute. It recognizes that what counts as “right” or “just” is always already situated—historically, culturally, politically—and that ethics, to remain alive, must remain in motion. It must be responsive to the emerging needs of our time, including the needs of those who have been historically excluded from moral consideration altogether.
Crucially, such a shift does not entail ethical relativism or nihilism, which often suggests that all moral systems are equally valid or that moral truths are entirely subjective and unknowable. On the contrary, this reorientation demands a deeper, more rigorous form of accountability—one that resists the comforting appeal of preordained answers and embraces the discomfort and challenge of moral ambiguity. In this view, ethics is not about finding simple, one-size-fits-all solutions to moral dilemmas. Instead, it is about engaging deeply with the complexities of human life, recognizing that moral decisions are often fraught with contradiction, uncertainty, and competing values.
This shift is not a retreat from ethics, nor is it a form of moral paralysis that claims “anything goes.” Rather, it is a radicalization of ethics—a movement that calls for more rigorous, thoughtful engagement with what it means to live ethically in a world defined by inequality, power, and difference. By questioning the foundations of a “programmed” morality, one that offers fixed rules and clear-cut answers, we are not abandoning the pursuit of how to live well. Instead, we are revitalizing it by challenging the assumptions that have historically underpinned moral systems. We reorient the search for meaning and justice from passive obedience to active, critical participation.
This radicalized ethics is one that thrives in the tension of uncertainty and embraces the fact that moral life is often messy, plural, and full of contradictions. It resists the temptation to simplify ethical decisions into binary choices of right and wrong, good and bad, but instead fosters an understanding of ethics as a dynamic, evolving practice—one that is always situated in context and always open to revision. Such an ethics recognizes that moral clarity is often elusive, but that this elusiveness does not diminish the need for moral responsibility. In fact, it heightens the importance of being accountable to the complexities and consequences of our actions, knowing that the answers we seek are often not readily available but must be shaped through ongoing engagement with others and with the world.
By embracing this model of ethical practice, we create space for an ethics that is as much about unlearning as it is about learning. In order to truly engage with ethical challenges, we must first unlearn the deeply ingrained assumptions that have shaped our moral thinking—whether they be unquestioned cultural norms, historical biases, or limiting ideas about the self and others. This process of unlearning is not an abandonment of morality, but rather an invitation to rethink the very foundations upon which moral systems are built. It requires us to confront difficult questions and grapple with the discomfort of uncertainty.
At the same time, this ethics is also about learning—learning to listen as much as we speak, learning to hold space for others’ experiences, learning to be attentive to the needs and struggles of the most marginalized and silenced. Listening, in this sense, is not a passive act; it is an active process of engaging with and making room for different perspectives, even when they challenge our own deeply held beliefs. It involves stepping outside of one’s own frame of reference and acknowledging the limits of one’s own understanding, while remaining open to the possibility of transformation through dialogue and mutual care.
Rather than being about obedience to a fixed set of rules, this new vision of ethics emphasizes responsiveness—an active, engaged listening to the world, to others, and to ourselves. Responsiveness does not mean passivity or indecision, but a kind of ethical attentiveness, a constant checking of our assumptions and our actions in relation to the shifting needs, concerns, and values that emerge from different contexts. It is an ongoing process of being attuned to the voices and experiences that have been excluded or silenced, and responding to the call for justice, care, and solidarity. This form of ethics does not rely on universal answers, but on an openness to encounter the world in all its complexity, with a willingness to adapt, learn, and change as new challenges and possibilities arise.
This space, freed from the constraints of normative morality, also offers the promise of ethical life not as closure, but as becoming. Rather than arriving at a final, immutable definition of what it means to be “good,” ethical life becomes an ongoing process of growth, evolution, and transformation. It is no longer a matter of achieving a static ideal, but of living in an open-ended relationship with our own moral development, one that is always unfinished and always subject to the fluid dynamics of time, context, and change. In this way, ethics becomes something we do, something we practice and work through together, rather than something we simply inherit or impose upon others. It is a continuous becoming—one that is always in the process of redefinition, adaptation, and resistance to the forces that seek to constrain it.
Ultimately, it is in this space of possibility, beyond the tyranny of normalcy, that we can truly begin to build a more just, inclusive, and imaginative ethical world—one that is not shaped by the past but is continually being re-envisioned, redefined, and re-formed in response to the present and the future.
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Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3–5.
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 135–169.
3. Ibid.
4. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 92–102.
5. Ibid., 30.
6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 184–185.
7. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 40–55.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), vol. 1, 5–7.
9. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 109–118.
10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 79–82.
11. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 11–22.
12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 291–293.
13. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1–27.
14. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21–24.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
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