ABSTRACT
The context of nature law as understood today requires the would-be ethician to scan a broader horizon, to bring into the account implications for human life that the ideoscopic investigations of science have brought to the fore. With human beings, at the apex of the evolution of material substance, a new kind of animal is born, the semiotic animal, as the human animals become aware not only of the difference between objects and things, but more profoundly of the difference between sign-vehicles and signs in their proper being as triadic relations. The present state of affairs as a prospective semiosis requires an interpretant: that interpretant is not a relation but something or aspect thereof, just as a sign-vehicle is not a relation but something or aspect thereof. Thus the 'semioethic animal' is derivative from, not a substitute for, the 'semiotic animal', and based precisely on understanding today of nature for man, as Johannes Messner put it.
