This is a formal ontology of the relational ethics framework developed in The Geometry of the Good. The book argues that obligation is not chosen, constructed, or reasoned into existence, but discovered ontologically wherever one conscious being encounters another as a locus of directedness. The ontology renders this framework in formal terms, grounded in the Basic Formal Ontology, so that the structural commitments of the argument become inspectable, queryable, and citable.
What this is
Moral life has long been described as a system of rules, duties, or outcomes, as if obligation were a force acting upon isolated moral agents. The Geometry of the Good argues that this is the wrong picture. What if, like Einstein's insight about space, the ethical field is not flat, and selves are not isolated particles but bodies curving space around them?
The book's central thesis is that being-with bends the moral field. The presence of another is not inert; it exerts pull. It generates obligation not through command or consent, but through relational mass: vulnerability, directedness, mutuality. To act ethically is not to follow a law, but to move faithfully within this curvature. Obligation is not a force imposed; it is the shape of the world as it becomes real between us.
This ontology renders the formal commitments of that argument. Each concept the book introduces — directedness, obligation, fidelity, recognition, rupture, addressability, being-with — appears as a class typed under the Basic Formal Ontology, with relations to the passages where it is developed in the text. The ontology is offered for several uses:
- As a structural reference for readers of the book who want to inspect its formal commitments precisely.
- As a critical instrument for philosophers who want to engage the framework on formal terms — testing its consistency, locating its tensions, proposing alternative renderings.
- As an extension surface for researchers who want to build on the framework: applied ethics in technology, AI, law, environmental obligation, intergenerational responsibility.
It does not replace reading the book. It is a complement: a formal map of the philosophical territory the book argues over.
No login required. No queries logged. Pure public artifact.
Contents
Browser
Interactive viewer with BFO tree, source-text view, and full-text search across the book.
iiMethodology
How the ontology was constructed, the BFO mapping decisions, and the limits of the source-text reconstruction.
iiiCitation
How to cite this artifact and the book it formalizes. BibTeX, Chicago, MLA.
ivDownload
The OWL artifact itself. Inspect with Protégé, query with rdflib, reason with HermiT.
What this is not
This is not The Geometry of the Good. It is a formal map of the book's structural commitments. Many things the book argues prose-philosophically — the rhetorical pressure of the contradiction-of-denial argument, the phenomenology of being-addressed, the Einstein analogy — do not appear in the ontology and are not meant to. The ontology surfaces what can be made structurally precise. The book carries the rest.
Many decisions were made in formalization that another reader might make differently. The methodology page describes those decisions. The ontology is open to disagreement, criticism, and replacement by better renderings. The artifact is a starting point for that kind of engagement, not a settled answer.
The reasoner that validated the ontology checked for formal consistency. It did not check for fidelity to the book or for philosophical defensibility. Those judgments belong to the reader.
Acknowledgements
The Basic Formal Ontology, on which this work depends, was developed by Barry Smith and colleagues over the past two decades and is documented in Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology (Arp, Smith, and Spear, MIT Press, 2015). The HermiT reasoner is the work of Birte Glimm, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik, Giorgos Stoilos, and Zhe Wang.
The source text is The Geometry of the Good: The Architecture of Social Being, Book 1 by David R. Koepsell (2025), copyright the author. The ontology and this site are released under CC-BY 4.0. The book itself remains under copyright.
The extraction and finalization pipeline is BFO-Agent, an architecture by the same author. Source available at github.com/dkoepsell/bfo-agent.
Companion ontologies of canonical philosophical texts are available at spinoza.davidkoepsell.com and leibniz.davidkoepsell.com. Comparison between the Geometry of the Good framework and prior figures in the tradition is a planned area of follow-up work.