What is Networked Mimetic Ethics?

Introducing a new ethical framework by Christopher I. L. James.

Networked Mimetic Ethics

Networked Mimetic Ethics (NME) is a contemporary ethical framework developed by Christopher I. L. James, grounded in a simple but generative premise: ethics spreads.

Where traditional moral theories locate ethics in will (Kant), consequence (Mill), or character (Aristotle), NME begins elsewhere; with transmission. It suggests that ethical life unfolds not only through what individuals decide, but through what they absorb, echo, and propagate. In a networked world, imitation, visibility, and influence play an increasingly dominant role in shaping what is seen, believed, and enacted as moral.

NME reframes the ethical subject not as a sovereign agent, but as a reflective node in a system of flows. Ethics is still a human responsibility; but one now understood as participatory, systemic, and mimetic in nature.

The Core Idea

At the heart of NME is a shift in where we believe ethics happens.

It does not reside only in private deliberation or codified principle. It moves through conversations, institutions, algorithms, and affective signals. In these spaces, values are reinforced, echoed and passed on.

Mimetic Ethics posits that ethical behaviour is not merely acted, it is transmitted. It is imitated, distorted, refracted, and magnified within systems of culture, technology, and shared attention.

In this way, ethical responsibility extends beyond what we do, to include what we carry, what we reinforce, and what we transmit to others; knowingly or not.

Mapping Ethical Transmission

To enter the philosophy is to begin noticing the unseen flows shaping ethical life.

Networked Mimetic Ethics offers three foundational concepts to help map these transmissions

•Ethical Vectors
The channels through which values and behaviours spread; across media, institutions, and interpersonal influence. Vectors determine how ethical (or unethical) patterns gain momentum within a system.

•Reflective Nodes
The individuals, communities, or entities that either transmit, distort, or interrupt moral influence. Every node holds the potential to replicate, resist, or reshape what passes through it.

•Contagion Thresholds
The critical points at which mimetic patterns tip into cultural norms. These thresholds reveal how ethical behaviours can either be sustained or collapse based on visibility, reinforcement, and systemic feedback.

Together, these concepts form a map, not of what is right or wrong, but of how right and wrong travel.

A Quiet Invitation

This is only an entry point.

If the ideas here speak to you, if you sense the need for a new ethics shaped by systems, influence, and shared responsibility; you are invited to go deeper.

You may begin with the monograph, which lays out the full theoretical structure.

You may explore the Living Ethics Manifesto, a declaration of the philosophy’s intent.

Or you may engage with the articles, each developing a different dimension of the framework.

What matters most is not agreement, but reflection.

To step into Mimetic Ethics is not to accept a doctrine, but to notice, with greater clarity, what moves through us all.