​Chapter 1

A soldier kills an enemy. The patriot will say: good, he defended his country. The Christian pacifist calls it evil: "Thou shalt not kill." Both are certain their judgment is absolute; they deliver it with complete conviction. Where does this assurance come from?

From the fact of the killing. The patriot evaluated it through the lens of duty to the nation, the Christian — on the basis of the commandment. Two different conclusions are drawn from the same fact.

We're already wrong, though. Both judgments preceded the fact. The patriot knew that defending the homeland was good long before this particular soldier pulled the trigger. The Christian believed that killing was evil from the moment he accepted the commandment. The fact just activated a ready-made judgment.

This judgment follows from a picture of the world, which comes from an ontology, from how reality is structured inside the head of the one who judges. The patriot inhabits a world where the nation is the supreme value, and its defense outweighs the life of a particular human being. For the Christian, it is God who issued a norm, and its violation outweighs any earthly consideration. These are two different worlds and the moral verdict is a consequence of architecture, not an independent act of reason.

"Killing is evil" looks like a statement capable of standing without metaphysics, a self-evident truth requiring nothing more than basic human feeling. Now add an ontological frame. Suppose the victim is a righteous man and an afterlife exists. The killing sent him to paradise for eternal bliss. Thirty years of earthly existence exchanged for infinity of joy. Is this evil? Finite suffering traded for infinite good, a favorable deal. Yet nearly everyone who hears this argument will feel uncomfortable.

Now a different frame. For a materialist the victim simply ceased to exist. Would the remainder of his life have been happy? Unknown. Would it have contained more suffering than joy? Unknown. Would it have benefited others? Nobody knows. Without any details about what the remaining life would have been, the claim "life interruption is evil" hangs in the air. The materialist is forced to lean on additional assumptions: life is inherently valuable and suffering is undesirable. These assumptions are postulates. Together they constitute the hidden ontology of his ethics, so familiar it is perceived as the absence of ontology.

The circle closes. Religious ethics rests on religious metaphysics; secular ethics rests on secular philosophy. Each obscures its underlying principles: the former through the claim of divine revelation, the latter with the guise of "self-evidence" and "common sense." Ethics without an ontology beneath it is a fiction. It usually hides its ontology so effectively that it becomes invisible.

To say that the ontology is hidden does not mean that its dogma is concealed. The Nicene Creed is not a secret document; a materialist philosophy textbook is available to anyone. The hiddenness is in the subject. A person who insists that life is sacred may have no idea that this conviction follows from an ontology at all — he has never traced the connection between his moral judgment and the worldview that produces it. A theologian or a committed materialist sees his ontology, can articulate it, and still does not recognize it as a postulate. For him, it is a description of what is the case; the ontology’s postulatory character remains undetectable.

Both cases of hidden ontology are products of the same mechanism. It was described in The Black Flame under the name of ontologization. Any concept accepted as a starting point can exist in two modes. In the first, the subject holds it consciously: he knows he is assuming something and that the axiom could in principle be otherwise. In the second, the postulate has been absorbed so thoroughly that it no longer registers as an assumption at all. It has fused with the subject's perception of the world. It is reality. Ontologization is the process by which a postulate transitions from the first mode to the second. What was once a choice or an imposition hardens into an undeniable fact. The idea no longer appears as a way of seeing the world; it is presented as the world.

The idea has crossed the threshold beyond which it is no longer examined, while the criteria for what counts as a valid question are themselves products of the same ontology. And this makes the history of ethics legible in a new way. An ethical system can be read as an attempt to install a particular picture of reality so deep that the morality growing from it appears self-evident and universal. The first thinker to perform this move with full philosophical self-awareness was Plato.

In Euthyphro, Socrates poses a question: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because the gods love it? If the first, then the gods are subordinate to a moral law that exists independently of them. If the second, morality is arbitrary: the pious is whatever pleases the gods, and were the opposite to please them, it would be equally pious. Euthyphro, predictably, got tangled. Plato offered a way out: the idea of the Good as a transcendent source, independent of both gods and human caprice.

This solution became the template for two millennia of Western ethics. Christianity replaced Plato's Good with God but kept the concept: there exists a supreme source of morality, accessible through revelation. Kant substituted God with the authority of pure reason but again the premise was the same.

The trouble is that Plato's solution is the pure case of ontologization. He saw that moral quality depends on ontology and responded by constructing the "correct" ontology, in which the Good has objective status. Instead of registering the dependence as a fundamental fact, he attempted to resolve it by anchoring morality in a secure foundation. All subsequent systems repeated the same move. The content of the foundation changed (God, Reason, Nature, the Social Contract, the Maximization of Happiness) but the core remained: morality depends on ontology, and philosophy's task is to find the correct ontology from which the correct morality follows.

This search presupposes that among the available ontologies there is one that is a description of how things actually are. In Against the Light it was argued that no ontology meets this criterion. Any ontology is built on an axiom, a starting point that cannot be derived from anything more fundamental without invoking yet another starting point. The choice between ontologies is between postulates, and no procedure exists that could adjudicate the choice from a position outside. If this is granted, then the project of grounding morality always fails.

The plurality of ontologies is itself the proof of their postulatory character. If any one were demonstrable, the rest would be errors and the dispute would have been settled — the way the geocentric model of the universe was closed. It never has. Theologians and materialists coexist for millennia, each aware that the other's picture exists, each unmoved. A fact does not need to be defended; a postulate does. Paul Tillich observed that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element within it. The observation cuts both ways: the believer who doubts knows, at some level, that his foundation is a decision, and the materialist who argues with fury against the believer betrays the same awareness.

Searching for the "right" ontology beneath morality is the same as looking for the correct illusion. Most moral disagreements are ontological conflicts disguised as value disputes. The participants think their discussion centers on what is good and evil, yet they are actually debating how reality is constituted, with moral conclusions arising naturally from this underlying divergence.

For someone who holds that the soul arises at conception, abortion is murder. For those who believe that until a certain stage the fetus is a collection of cells, abortion is a medical procedure. Both may hold the same values: life matters, and suffering should be avoided. The disagreement is ontological: does the soul exist and what is "life" in the relevant sense? The moral judgment about abortion computes itself from these initial parameters.

For people who believe in an afterlife and divine judgment, hastening death usurps God's prerogative. If someone considers consciousness a product of the brain and life a finite process, helping a terminally ill person leave without agony is an act of mercy.

The Christian, the utilitarian, and the Marxist all agree that the poor should be helped. It looks like these traditions are arriving at the same moral truth, but the agreement is accidental. The Christian helps the poor because they are children of God and charity is commanded. For the utilitarian, aiding the poor is essential as poverty embodies a concentration of suffering, and redistribution alleviates the overall burden. And the Marxist declares that poverty arises from systemic exploitation, and providing assistance is a step toward dismantling the structures that produced the poverty in the first place. They all agree until the situation shifts. Ask whether you should help a poor man who will use the money to buy drugs and the moral consensus evaporates the moment the ontologies are forced to compute a different case.

The concealment goes deeper than the examples above suggest. In the cases of abortion and euthanasia the ontological disagreement is at least identifiable: the participants can locate the point at which their pictures of reality diverge. Often the contradiction is invisible since it is embedded in the words themselves. Two people argue about free will. One means the capacity to choose between available options; the other implies the absence of determination by prior causes. Each is arguing about a different object under an identical label. "Justice" means proportional distribution for one subject and earned desert for another. "Love" is unconditional acceptance or active correction. "Violence" extends to speech or stops at physical force. The boundary is drawn by the ontology the subject carries.

Ethics as a discipline has taken this illusion at face value. It studies moral judgments as though an independent moral faculty existed, producing evaluations regardless of one's picture of the world. Entire schools, like deontology, utilitarianism or virtue ethics, are built on the misconception that one can find the right method for producing moral verdicts if procedure is correctly calibrated.

But the algorithm works only inside an accepted ontology. Universalization of maxims requires "universality" to be a meaningful criterion (and why, exactly?). Calculation of consequences presupposes that suffering is measurable and undesirable (from where does this follow?). Each procedure is embedded in its own philosophy and valid only within it.

Not all ontologies determine morality with equal rigidity. Some yield a single output like Christianity. The commandment is its direct product, and the margin for interpretation, while real, is narrow. Other ontologies do not prescribe a morality; they constrain the space within which it can be constructed. The materialist ontology is compatible with a wide range of moral conclusions. One materialist may decide that since consciousness is a fleeting accident, life is infinitely precious and must be protected. Another may claim that since consciousness is a fleeting accident, nothing has inherent value and sentimentality about life is self-deception. The ontology has eliminated certain options, such as divine laws or cosmic justice, but it has not selected among the remainder.

The relationship between ontology and morality, then, is not always a deduction. It is sometimes derivation (as in rigid doctrinal systems), sometimes constraint or something in between. The subject who believes that "reality is matter" still needs additional postulates to get to "therefore suffering should be minimized" which are themselves ontological commitments.

Every moral judgment is a derivative of a picture of the world. But where does the worldview itself come from?