Ethics Without Separation: Structural Normativity Under Consciousness-First Metaphysics

Abstract: Standard ethical frameworks presuppose ontological separation: deontology legislates relations between independent rational agents, consequentialism calculates outcomes for distinct bearers of welfare, virtue ethics cultivates character within bounded selves — all assuming morality must bridge a gap between fundamentally separate beings. Under analytic idealism, that assumption dissolves. Individual minds are dissociated aspects of a single consciousness, making the boundary between self and other ontologically provisional. Harming another is therefore not merely wrong by rule or calculation but structurally incoherent: self-damage performed under the illusion of separation. Ethics arises from the structure of reality itself; ethical failure is perceptual failure — the inability to see through the dissociative boundary — and ethical development is the progressive transparency of that boundary. The essay shows how harm deepens the dissociation generating it, how justice must be reparative rather than retributive when perpetrator and victim share one consciousness, and how Socratic, Buddhist, Vedantic, and Western traditions converge on the same structural insight. The epistemic standard throughout is structural analysis, not moral exhortation. Keywords: idealist ethics · ontological unity · structural normativity · dissociation · self-other distinction · ethical development · moral perception · Vedanta · consciousness Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 26 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://brunoton.github.io/return-to-consciousness/