Ethics of Ephemerality: Moral Decision-Making from a Ground of Minimal-Dual Awareness

Summary

When the usual sense of a continuous self or personal story fades, ethical obligations become grounded in direct contact with present reality, especially others' suffering and vulnerability. This yields a virtue ethics called 'Ephemeral Virtue,' where moral action is guided by immediate perception with minimal ego-distortions, aiming at non-harm, honesty, and proportionate care. The paper argues that mainstream ethical theories rely on a narrative self and proposes that mindfulness-like states may reduce brain Default Mode Network activity and increase prosocial behavior, outlining experimental designs to test these predictions.

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Abstract

In a world understood through Existential Realism (ER) – where only the present moment truly “exists” – and under Minimal-Dual Awareness (MDA) – a mode of consciousness with reduced self–other splits and narrative thought – a puzzle arises: What grounds our obligations, commitments, and ethical agency when the “story-self” dissolves? We propose that ethical authority is rooted in the relational reality of the present. Instead of appeals to future plans or past identities, our normativity derives from a disciplined, non-evasive contact with whatever exists now – notably others’ suffering, dependence, and vulnerability. This yields a novel normative model we call “Ephemeral Virtue,” a present-responsive virtue-ethics. It establishes a third mode of moral cognition, distinct from both consequentialism (utility aggregation) and deontology (rule-obedience), characterized by minimal-dual responsiveness: action guided by immediate perception and few ego-distortions, aiming spontaneously at non-harm, honesty, and proportionate care. We show that mainstream moral theories (Kantian, utilitarian, contractarian, even care ethics) implicitly rely on a diachronic narrative self – and explore how commitments, blame, and justice can be re-interpreted and re-grounded when narrative constraints relax. We develop a taxonomy of present-centered virtues (e.g. non-evasion, attunement, impartial benevolence) that flourish in the moment. Finally, we connect this framework to moral psychology and neuroeconomics, proposing testable hypotheses: for example, that MDA (or mindfulness-like) states will reduce activity in the Default Mode Network (a neural correlate of narrative self), and correspond with greater prosocial behavior in economic games. We outline experimental designs – combining psychometric measures of present-awareness (e.g. nondual awareness scales), behavioral tasks (e.g. moral dilemmas, trust games), and neural metrics (fMRI DMN connectivity) – to investigate these predictions. By doing so, this paper aims to (i) offer a rigorous normative theory of “ephemeral virtue”, (ii) expose the hidden narrative-dependence in ethical thought, and (iii) chart a path toward empirical study of moment-based moral cognition.

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