Within the Ashtavakra Gita, action and ethical conduct are treated from a radically non-dual standpoint. Liberation is said to arise solely through direct knowledge of the Self as pure, actionless consciousness, rather than through ritual, meritorious deeds, or gradual moral refinement. Actions are attributed to the body–mind complex, which is regarded as ultimately insentient and unreal, while the true Self is understood as the non-doer and non-enjoyer. From this vantage point, the entire structure of doership and consequence is to be seen through, not perfected or improved.

Because of this emphasis, conventional ethical categories—dharma and adharma, virtue and vice, purity and impurity—are relativized. They are acknowledged as belonging to the empirical realm of ignorance and duality, not to the ultimate truth of the Self. Concern with ethical conduct, in this view, is meaningful only so long as one identifies as an individual agent. Once the Self is recognized as the actionless witness, moral distinctions no longer define or bind that realization, even though the text does not encourage their deliberate violation.

For the realized sage, actions may still appear to occur through the body due to prior tendencies, yet these are seen as mere appearances within consciousness. Such a being acts spontaneously and without attachment to results, free from the sense of doership and from karmic bondage. Ethical behavior then becomes a natural, effortless expression of freedom from ego and craving, rather than the outcome of adherence to prescribed rules. Outer austerities, ritualism, and showy renunciation are treated as secondary or even distracting if they are not grounded in clear recognition of the Self, for true renunciation is the quiet dropping of the claim “I am the doer.”