Human geography seems especially invigorated these days. Geographical scholarship is abuzz with passion, performance and affect, infused with a sense of playfulness and a spirit of optimism and experimentation. All of this appears to betoken a new understanding of ethics, as well, one that is less about dour denouncements of injustice or sober analyses of normative principles, and more about enhancing, and celebrating, our immersion in Being. Most of the work expressing this new spirit can be placed under the umbrella term of ‘non-representational theory’, a label that even its proponents acknowledge is rather imprecise, but which at base signals a renewed interest in materialist, corporeal and performative ontologies. Non-representational theory has been the subject of significant discussion already (see H. Lorimer, 2005; 2007; Whatmore, 2006) and I make no attempt to provide a full review here. But I do wish to ask whether this approach might offer a different set of resources for considering matters of ethics and responsibility. It would seem so on the surface, and indeed ‘ethics’ is a term that appears with regularity in work from a nonrepresentational perspective. With a few notable exceptions, however, the notion of ethics invoked has remained implicit, and my sense is that a more sustained examination of the intersection between ethics and the new materialism may be warranted. My aim in what follows is to begin this task. As we will see, my overall impression is that recent forays into non-representational and materialist ontology have considerable potential to ‘extend the field of the ethical in which geographers might move’(McCormack, 2003: 488), but that there nevertheless remains an opportunity to orient the discussion in some new, and potentially productive, directions.