<p>In this essay, we explore the parts of ethical life that cannot be captured and may actually be foreclosed by the dominant principle-centered approach to AI ethics. We argue that principles maintain traces of the moral encounters they were abstracted from, including traces of the moral and metaphysical intuitions that guided people in those encounters. Principlism is thus haunted by an unacknowledged particularity and what we call a “spectral moral ontology.” While bioethics principlism remains connected to the animating force of the encounter through a moral actor, who vivifies its spectral moral ontology, AI possibly removes this moral actor. To do so, programmers must further abstract from the moral encounter by reducing the principles to formal logics cutting “ethics” off from its animating force. This approach to AI ethics creates and deploys a reductive spectral moral ontology that is woefully inadequate to the complexity and irreducibility of the moral encounter.</p>