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if ethics means anything, it is a way of thinking about self-limitation.
if you understand directing attention toward something, particularly in the form of a project (an action) as involving a means-ends relation, and within that a calculation (at least implicitly) or better a calculus (a set of relations and transforms) then it'd kinda follow that anything can be rationalised---in a way that's a tautology (a project is a project).
ethics would be a meta-consideration: should i do this, should i do that...
but this really is not as easy as the quote in the op would have you think. things get ugly fast:
take a limit-case: the holocaust was administered by perfectly ordinary, nice people who functioned in a bureaucratic setting that enabled them--required them in a sense--to separate their professional "duty" (carrying out of particular functions every day) from a grasp of what that duty was part of, what it tended toward. bounded rationalities, they call this sort of thing: the effects of the way information is split up and transmitted through a bureaucratic apparatus. in principle, it's possible that such a machine could function continuously----raising ethical problems about the End functions as a select mechanism within the machinery--raise questions that violate the rules of the everyday game (the bounded rationality) and you render yourself dysfunctional within the machinery---and given the "industrial reserve army" it'd be easy peasy to find someone to take your place---so the ethical questions that one could or should raise become de facto situational suicide. you could say that most situations, particularly bureaucratic situations (and capitalism is thoroughly bureaucratic), are like this, and the invocation of the holocaust here a way oif indicating that there is NO limit to what can be rationalized (in the psychological sense) as a function of rationalization (in the weberian sense, the bureaucratic sense).
folk like to think in terms of the Lone Cowboy who Stands Up to the Man because they like to fantasize that they would be that Lone Cowboy, but in reality chances are that most people would go along because, frankly, most people like going along and besides it's all too easy to not confront what you're going along with. think about being -american and the implications will become clear---what you de facto collude with as you move through your life, what options there are in terms of dissent, what dissent costs you if you enact it and take it too far in the wrong situation, say. better to dream about celluiloid cowboys: they help you rationalize everyday capitulation.
what this indicates is that the quote in the op starts off as vaguely interesting, but then veers into a stupid place, once the "ethical problems never include the self" business is introduced--as if the Heroic Subject somehow stands outside the rationalities which that same subject internalizes and performs every day, which shape the horizons and in so doing shape the possibilities of thinking self-limitation.
this kind of situation is why some ethicists like deontology--it allows them to pretend that there are absolute duties which are imposed somehow on all of us that would Prevent Bad Things from happening.
this is easier than facing the contrary.
i'm not going to go from here to saying anything about the metaphysics of evil, except to say that for the MOST part, it's a compensatory illusion---but there are evil people, i think. what makes them evil is that they put into motion systems which engender separations that engender more evil to be done, often by perfectly ordinary nice people with lives and houses and gardens and with no particular contradiction entering the picture between what they do and their nice, ordinariness. it is the banality of evil that's the frightening thing, like arendt said once.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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