The Metaphysics of Ethics

People drawn to metaphysics can sometimes have the view that ethics is messy, imprecise, and not sufficiently rule-governed. People drawn to ethics can sometimes have the view that metaphysics is abstract, technical, and insufficiently attentive to real-world issues and concerns. But metaphysics and ethics are more interconnected than these views suggest. In this subject, we explore the relation between metaphysics and ethics, using social ontology as the bridge between the two. Topics include objects, persistence, modality, mereology, and causation, and their relations to individual and collective moral obligation and moral responsibility. These discussions have real-world implications for tax laws, the value of historical artefacts, cultural group membership, the relation between the individual and her community, moral truth, surrogacy, gender identification, reparations for historical injustice, moral luck, and culpability for what we fail to do.