The Zeroth Step of Philosophy: Why Your Ethics Are Just Metaphysics in Disguise

Philosophy, as vast of a topic as it can be, everything is encompassed under it, but when I say the word, what is the immediate thought that follows in your mind? Maybe the Trolley problem, on ethics and whom to save; or maybe the question of theists, the existence of God; or the best way to live life, stoicism vs. hedonism, and more…

That is all an integral part of philosophy, but not necessarily the very first or the zeroth part. All the ethics, aesthetics, moral, and social theories are the emergent conclusion, the result of a person’s metaphysical worldview. And in this era of philosophy where, for most people, it is done over short-form media, metaphysical questions are often deemed impractical to engage with. Maybe this is also a result of the pragmatic, scientific world we live in, where most people seem to have accepted the pragmatic worldview, or still carry their religious beliefs, or sometimes a mixture of both.

So, to better internalize the philosophical worldview, let’s focus on metaphysics and try to understand it more: what it means, what sort of questions it asks, and eventually, how it leads to the rest of the philosophical thought that follows it.

Metaphysics

As most things in Philosophy there is no absolute agreed upon definition for it, but many may define it as the branch of Philosophy or the Discipline that concerns itself with the fundamental nature of reality.

Traditionally metaphysics from the work of Aristotle can be broken down into these two distinct subjects of analysis:

• Study of the first causes → first causes are those inherent/innate defined objects from which emanate/originate the rest of the word or from which it follows from.
• Study of Being → the study of existence → aka the study of which exists → or we can define it as the investigation of an object through Aristotle’s Four Causes.

The Study of the first Cause (the unmoved mover)

The argument that Aristotle put is as follows:

• Premise 1: Change and motion in the physical universe are real, continuous, and eternal.
• Premise 2: Whatever is moved or changed must be moved or changed by something else already in a state of actuality (the principle of motion, aka already caused or existing).
• Premise 3: An infinite regress of moved movers is logically impossible, because without a first initiator, there would be no subsequent motion at all. (every object that is made to exist is by some other, to have an infinite chain of causality seems absurd)
• Premise 4: Therefore, there must be a primary source of motion that initiates change without being moved or changed by anything else. (the nature of chain, must be similar to that of a geometrical ray, with a fixed start point)
• Premise 5: To be completely unmoved, this primary source cannot possess any potentiality (the capacity to be changed); it must be pure actuality. (not being caused by any other object)
• Premise 6: Material objects inherently possess potentiality, occupy space, and are subject to change.

• Conclusion: Therefore, there must exist a primary, eternal, immaterial, and entirely unchanging substance/objects—the Unmoved Mover—which serves as the ultimate cause of all motion in the universe.

Now this unmoved mover has given theistic people a claim to say that God exist, it fits the description of God, and that they have proved the existence of his. Even if it does not make any comment on the nature of the God, they definitely are one step closer.

But some of you now may say, that we are committing a logical fallacy, maybe you are just a person of wits or just have read through the Logic Module 4: A Guide to Logical Fallacies, you may identify the The Fallacy of Composition in here,logicians argues that because individual objects within the universe require a cause, the entire universe as a whole must require a cause, this is not necessarily true the system as a whole may have different nature than the components it is made up of.

The Study of Being

To explain why any object exists at all, Aristotle established four fundamental principles:

• Material Cause: The physical material that makes up a thing (e.g., bricks for a building).
• Formal Cause: The shape, structure, or essence of a thing (e.g., the blueprint of a house).
• Efficient Cause: The primary source of the change or rest (e.g., the workers building the house).
• Final Cause: The purpose or goal (telos) of a thing (e.g., a house’s purpose is to provide shelter).

Identifying and investigating these causes were one of the most important analyses in Aristotelian metaphysics.

Hmm, now when we are clear with the Aristotelian metaphysics, now we may shift our focus onto the modern state of the Metaphysical analysis, it is primarily divided into two part:

• General Metaphysics — Ontology → the study of most general features of existence {this is certainly an extension of the aristotelian metaphysics but more abstracted away}

• Special Metaphysics
  • Cosmology: Philosophical study of the origin and structure of the universe.
  • Rational Psychology: Philosophical study of the soul and mind using pure reason.
  • Natural Theology: Studying God and divine reality through reason, not revelation.

The questions that spring from these branches can be boiled down to a few big ones:

• Immortality: The concept of the consciousness surviving forever after physical death.
• Free Will: The human ability to choose actions without external determinism.
• Mind Body Prob: The question of how physical brains connect to conscious minds.

General Metaphysics (Ontology)

What exists?

Seriously, that one question is most of the ontology. Look around in your place wherever you are reading this, what is actually there, you might easily be able to point out to the physical things like furniture, walls or the media you are reading this on, but what about the less obvious stuff..

Do properties (like colour) exist? How about relations between things, numbers or events (as a concept), do they exist?

This is Ontology, a very sophisticated word for a very deceptively simple task of cataloging the real stuff.

When we start to actually do the task, we are hit with some innate questions:

• What is an object?
• What is a property?
• What is a cause?
• What is the fundamental nature of an object?

Hmm, not that easy of questions to answer, or maybe you might say they are just not practical to be concerned with, fair point, lets make them into axioms but let us try to understand them with examples so that we are on the same page: Object – it is something physical in the real world that you can verify by pragmatic means like a table, a cat or extremes like sub atomic particle and neutron stars. Property – An attribute or characteristic belonging to and describing an object, like height of a person, weight of a cat, or the redness of the color red. Cause – An event or entity that produces an effect or change, for example meowl the cat spilled a glass of a water, for the spilling of water meowl is the cause and the spilling of water the event.

Now to argue what the fundamental nature of an object is something of a long task, so for the sake of simplicity let it be its status as a unified entity that bears properties and persists through change.

Or in simple words objects are just a bundle of their features, like a shirt is nothing but a collection of texture of the fabric, the color of the die, the functionality of the buttons and so on.

This leads us to a finding that two objects can very much have a property in common between them and brings us to the beautiful age-old puzzle whether Universal exists or not?

Universals: Universals are things, traits, or concepts aka properties that can be shared among different individual objects or observers.

Think about qualia, the fancy word for your very subjective experience of seeing the “redness” of the apple. Is that redness a real, independent feature of the universe, or does it only exist in our individual minds? Do these universals actually exist out in the real world like objects or are they just a creation of our mind?

This same question, came across Plato’s mind and he proposed a two word system which is the metaphysical world view aka result of his metaphysical believes, he proposed the eternal perfect word of “Forms”, a world where concepts like beauty, color and other attributes exist in their true independent form, not attached to some object and the messy imperfect world that we live in all the objects borrow the property form the perfect eternal world of forms.

Okay ok, now let’s get away from the abstract part and move to the interesting ones.

Special Metaphysics

Traditionally the special metaphysics has been divided into three main fields, where you’ll find the biggest burning or to say The Big Questions, that we’ll ever ask.

Cosmology

Not to be confused with Physics or astronomy, it’s not about mapping out the size of stars or predicting the next space event. Philosophical Cosmology is about understanding and examining the ultimate questions of the origin of the universe, its design aka whether it is infinite or not, its functioning, whether the universe is entirely mechanistic or not, and relation to time, The question of does time itself has a beginning or the concept of time itself as some object that exists or is it just relativism to the objects and events going around and is an illusion created by our brains.

Rational Psychology

Ok being born in this scientific and pragmatic era, you must be thinking by the two defining terms the rational and the psychology, that it must be about the behavioral studies of the human mind through logic and data, but no it is about the problem of the self, but it is the attempt to understand the nature of the mind (not the brain), it targets the internal voice inside your head which talks to you, with which you reason and think, the voice which you call “I”, the voice of yourself. It asks us questions like is it the brain activity – the firing of the neurons, that gives this a rise or is it something more? The question of the mind-body dualism aka is your mind and brain the same thing or are they different and if different than how do they interact and coordinate together?

Natural Theology

OK, so as the name suggests, this is the study of “GOD,” the inquiry into religion, not through testimonies or personal experience, but through logic and reason. As we discussed earlier with the problem of the unmoved mover, there exists a decent case for the existence of some sort of eternal being. Though it’s questioned and challenged, for the sake of simplicity here, let’s assume that once the existence of GOD is established, the next thing we do is make an effort to identify the nature and the behavioral characteristics of GOD. Imagine questions like the Problem of Evil: given that GOD exists, why does suffering exist?

The focus is to use reason to map out and compare the nature of GOD that we derive against what’s in the mythological scriptures. One example of this could be that perhaps God is a cosmic programmer who kicked off the entire system, set the rules of physics in motion, and then simply went dormant, giving the system full independence to operate. Or maybe he doesn’t concern himself with individual suffering but does value systemic functioning, as it’s pointed out in many religious texts that GOD intervenes only when the collective systemic suffering or SIN is at a high point, and he comes in just to balance the system.

Or If we are using raw logic, we also have to consider darker possibilities. Who is to say the creator is all-loving? If we look at the immense suffering in the world, one could rationally argue that God exists but is fundamentally malicious or perhaps just deeply bored. To him human suffering and world history might just be an entertaining drama used by an eternal, indifferent being to pass the time.

So now when you have done all sorts of metaphysical analysis, it’s time to tackle the question that may arise due to the worldview that by this time you might have.

The Mind Body Problem

Before you can ask what happens to your mind when you die, or whether you have the freedom to make choices, we have to address what your mind actually is.

How does the physical, wet, tissue of your brain connect to your colorful, subjective, inner thoughts? In other words: How does matter create consciousness?

You have 3 broad choices to choose from:

• Physicalism: The Brain is the Mind, you believe that your mind is just your brain and the result of all its biochemical and electrical processes, given to create an exact replica of your lived brain to the moment it will be an exact clone of you, with no difference.
• Dualism: The Mind is separate, you believe that the physical matter and consciousness are two fundamentally different things, your mind (or soul) is non material operating independently of the brain, the brain is like a tool for the mind to manifest.
• Panschycism: The Mind is emergent, you believe that consciousness or the mind is a fundamental inherent property of the substance aka atoms itself and given to collectively organise and provide it with tools like the brain, it starts to show some intelligent life-like activities.

Just to be clear this is a very bad oversimplification of panschycism(please do your own readings on the topic)

Do You Have Free Will?

Now, the mind is sorted, let’s investigate the decision that it makes. Do you have free will aka agency over all your actions or is it just an illusion and it’s all mechanistic?

Well, if earlier you would’ve chosen the physicalism direction for the mind-body problem, the brain itself follows the laws of physics and chemistry, which are largely deterministic. So, can you even have free will if the thing that makes all your thoughts, decisions, and memories is deterministic, and you don’t really have a say in that? You may find some obscure edge like quantum physics giving us randomness, which is the proof that it’s not all deterministic and we do have agency. But if something is inherently random, by definition you have no control over it. So it may be non-deterministic, but you still don’t have any agency over it. So the concept of free will seems impossible here, and it draws an interesting conclusion: if you reverse time and move forward in it again, you would have lived exactly the same life as this one, with all the same thoughts and decisions that you’ve ever made.

On the other hand if you would’ve chosen the Dualism path, and you do believe in some sort of separation in mind and body. This unlocks the path of Libertarian Free Will, the idea that you have a genuine, unconstrained power of choice. Your soul acts as a free agent, initiating actions without being physically forced to do so.

For the panschycism I rest the debate to you whether you’ve free will or not.

Is your consciousness Immortal or is there an end to it?

For the physicalist, they die and it’s the end as simple as that, no drama of afterlife or whatever.

But to those who do not and do believe in the distinction of the mind and the flesh, based on your religious beliefs, it may be that your consciousness or the soul may transcend to some higher, better eternal afterlife based on your actions and practices. For the irreligious mad scientists, who believe in the multiverse theory may claim that their consciousness just resumes in a world where they are still alive, it’s like teleportation of consciousness to different quantum multiverses that have some vessel to harbour the conscious mind or soul.

So, whether you believe you are a biochemical machine whose lights simply go out at death, a free-floating soul destined for an afterlife, or a consciousness hopping across quantum multiverses, you have a metaphysical worldview.

But Why Does This Actually Matter?

If you remember, At the start of this essay, I mentioned that all the ethics, moral dilemmas (like the Trolley problem), and social theories are just emergent conclusions of a person’s metaphysical worldview. When people argue about what is right or wrong, or how to live a good life, they are usually just arguing about their underlying metaphysical assumptions without even realizing it.

To really see this in practice, let’s look at how a metaphysical blueprint perfectly constructs an ethical framework. And there is no better example for this than one of the most popular philosophies on the internet today: Stoicism.

When people talk about Stoicism today, especially on short-form media or in self-help podcasts, they usually focus on it as a practical guide for building mental toughness and finding inner peace. They will tell you to focus only on what you can control, live with core values like courage, and turn your daily struggles into opportunities.

But again if you look into why the stoics arrived at this conclusion, you realize that it is the intuitive and logical action plan to their metaphysical world views.

So, what sort of metaphysical worldview did the stoics have, it definitely has to be religious, right?

You can argue that they do certainly have some traditionally religious features but they were not strictly religious.

Let us look into the core component of the stoics metaphysical claims.

The Passive Principal (Corporealism): Everything is Physical. The Stoics believed that if something exists and can act on reality, it must be physical. This means all substances, the universe, and even the human soul aren’t abstract concepts; they are physical, material bodies.

The Active Principle: This is the force that acts upon the passive matter, giving it form, movement, and life through Logos and Pneuma.

Logos is the rationality of the universe. Coined by Heraclitus to denote the rational workings of the cosmos, Logos is the invisible, logical “software” that orders reality.

Pneuma is the physical material of the Active Principle. It literally translates to “breath.” The Stoics believed this was a literal, warm, fiery air that permeates all passive matter. It produces a simultaneous inward and outward movement, a constant state of “tension” that holds the physical world together.

These two principles aren’t separated like oil and water; they are completely blended together everywhere, in everything.

So essentially, Logos is the rational purpose, and Pneuma is the physical breath that executes it.

Now there is a bit of nuance to it, you may say so why are we conscious agents and a rock not well to oversimplify it, the stoics say that there is the scale of pneuma, Different objects possess different levels of complexity based entirely on the purity of the pneuma inside them, and human sit at the highest level of it, giving them the conscious and ability of independent reason and at the bottom would be the inanimate objects like rock in which the pneuma act just to prevent it from disintegrating, sort of like making it compliant to the rules of physics.

Finally if we zoom out far enough, the stoics claim on the cosmos level sum up to that the matter has just always been there in the universe, that is just a brute fact, no new material ever is created it is just reshaped and structured by the pneuma. And at scale the universe is rational as the result of the pneuma flowing into its every part which breathes the reason (logos) into it.

Now when you think of the universe as rational it’s logically true that anything that it does or happens within happens for a reason therefore fighting back is an effort in vain and all humans have is true control over their mind and reason.

So what were the stoic beliefs lets see how the metaphysical framework derives them:

• Focus only on what is worth control: Since the universe operates rationally and you cannot change fate, fighting external events like traffic is useless. You can only control your own mind.
• Money and fame are ruled by Fate: Wealth, status, and health are external physical events. Under Stoic physics, all external events are strictly determined by the cosmic reason (Fate). Staking your happiness on things you cannot control is fundamentally irrational and guarantees suffering. Therefore, they are “indifferents” and you should focus on your virtue.
• Turn struggles into opportunities: Setbacks are not random mistakes. A lost job or a flat tire is simply the exact challenge the universe handed you to practice being patient and strong.

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” — Marcus Aurelius

Hedonism: The Contrast

To really understand the idea of how the metaphysical worldview dictates your ethics, why not take a look at the greatest contrast framework of stoicism, Hedonism– the philosophical belief that maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain is the ultimate goal of human life. It views joy as the highest good and the primary motivator of all human actions.

Their metaphysical blueprint goes like this: The universe is completely physical, but it is fundamentally meaningless. It is just dead atoms crashing together randomly in a void. There is no Fate. There is no cosmic reason.

As for the mind-body problem? A strict physicalist view: your consciousness, your thoughts, and your experiences are nothing more than biological brain activity. There is no soul that survives death. When your physical body dies, the lights simply go out. It is the absolute end of the story.

So, if that is your metaphysics– a random, meaningless universe where death is the final period, what is the logical ethical conclusion?

Maximize pleasure and comfort.

If there is no grand cosmic duty to fulfill, and no afterlife to prepare for, then the only rational way to live is to listen to our base biology. We are wired to feel good. Therefore, the highest moral good you can achieve in this brief, random flash of existence is to seek pleasure, minimize pain, and make yourself and your friends as comfortable as possible.

Again, they didn’t just “choose” to be hedonists. Hedonism is simply the necessary result of a godless, strictly material, random metaphysical worldview.

“Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” — Epicurus

And This Brings Us Back to the Beginning

When you listen to people debate ethics, listen to different world views, politics, and moral dilemmas, you can never truly understand and internalize the ideas without knowing the metaphysical system they originate from.

People are often just arguing over the fruit, completely blind to the roots. But as we’ve seen, you cannot bypass the foundation. Before you can confidently ask, “How should I live?” or “What is the right thing to do?”, you first have to answer, “What is reality?” and “What am I?”

Metaphysics isn’t an impractical, abstract game—it is the zero’th step of all human thought. Because until you figure out what kind of universe you are actually living in, your ethics will always just be a guess.

“He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.” — Friedrich Nietzsche