Subjecthood, Loss, and the Fragmentation of Moral Ontology: Reconstructing a Minimal Framework

Moral philosophy has generated rich accounts of responsibility, loss, and subjecthood, yet these accounts have developed largely in isolation from one another. Discussions of moral remainder (Williams), moral luck (Nagel), the ontology of moral experience (Taylor), the phenomenological foundations of responsibility (Ingarden), the irreversibility of action (Arendt), and collective accountability (Walzer and Thompson) share a common concern but no common ground. Contemporary accounts of moral status — sentience-based, interest-based, capabilities-based — diagnose the same problem from a different angle, proposing criteria for which entities deserve moral consideration without explaining what a subject must be for such consideration to apply. This article surveys these traditions and asks whether they presuppose a shared, if tacit, ontological structure. The Axiomatic Theory of Tragic Subjecthood (ATTS; Hlynskyi, 2026a) is introduced as a candidate for that structure: a minimal ontological framework that reconstructs, rather than replaces, the insights these traditions contain. This article does not defend ATTS as true. It reconstructs ATTS as a candidate minimal ontology and evaluates how it relates to major traditions in moral philosophy, phenomenology, theories of responsibility, and contemporary moral status theory. The reconstruction is offered as a hypothesis: that these traditions share a structural presupposition that can be made explicit, and that ATTS provides one candidate specification of that presupposition.