Abstract: Ibsen wrote another major play on social issues, Ghosts, after the publication of his A Doll's House. The word, “ghosts”, a rhetoric used by Mrs. Alving, the heroine in the play, carries rich ethical connotations. Its metaphorical implication illustrates, from both physical and ethical perspectives, that the ethical conventions represented by Pastor Manders have had an irresistible impact on her and triggered a series of tragic consequences. The ethical conventions advocated by Pastor Manders are a set of ethical values that aim to replace ethics with ideals and choose duties over rights. These conventions cannot perform their basic function in entreating everyone to be good or regulating individual behavior, but nominally they still serve as the criteria for meansuring and judging individuals' morality, words, and deeds, and they even force individuals to adopt unethical means to create fake ethical appearance. Ibsen uses the double metaphor of “ghosts” to reveal the dilemma of individual survival caused by the ethical problem of our inability to pursue both truth and ideal at the same time, denounces the ethical values that are so idealistic as to negate the basic attributes of humans' existence as the Sphinx factor and violate natural laws, and expresses a moral appeal for self-emancipation.

Key words: Ghosts, Ibsen, metaphor, moral appeal