Steiner's view that moral ideals come from the same thinking that knows nature, so the world holds no second power that legislates right and wrong.
Ethical monism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account, set out in The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), of a single unified reality known through percept and concept, in which moral ideals are grasped by the very same thinking that knows nature. Against the metaphysical dualism that splits the world into a sensory realm and a supersensible beyond, Steiner holds the moral order to be the free creation of human beings, not the decree of a second legislator standing behind nature. Intuitive moral ideas arise within the individual, who realizes them as a free spirit rather than obeying an external power. The bearer of this knowing is the human I, and the application today is an ethics of self-given moral intuition rather than imposed law.
In Steiner's Own Words
The moral laws which the Metaphysician is bound to regard as issuing from a higher power have, according to the upholder of Monism, been conceived by men themselves. To him the moral order is neither a mere image of a purely mechanical order of nature nor of the divine government of the world, but through and through the free creation of men. It is not man's business to realize God's will in the world, but his own. He carries out his own decisions and intentions, not those of another being. Monism does not find behind human agents a ruler of the world, determining them to act according to his will. Men pursue only their own human ends.
What it Means Today
The whole argument of The Philosophy of Freedom turns on a single move: thinking is not a private film running alongside the world but the activity through which the world completes itself. Steiner spends the book's first half dismantling the two-world picture, in which nature sits on one side and an unknowable beyond on the other. Percept gives us the world in fragments; concept supplies the connections; together they are the one reality, with no third realm hidden behind them. Ethical monism is what happens when that epistemology is carried into morality. If thinking knows nature directly, then the moral ideals it produces are equally real and equally ours. There is no supersensible legislator handing down commandments from outside the world, because there is no outside.
This is why Steiner can say the moral order is the free creation of human beings. A deed done from an intuited moral idea is free precisely because nothing external compels it, neither natural instinct below nor divine decree above. The standard he gives is exact: an action is unfree when the agent obeys a perceptible outer compulsion, free when he obeys none but himself. For a contemporary reader, the Thalira reading is that ethical monism dissolves the old quarrel between religious heteronomy and mechanistic determinism by refusing the dualism both assume. Morality becomes neither obedience nor reflex but the human way of being moral, an ethics in which the same I that thinks the world also gives itself its law.
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