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i dont think the ethics/morality distinction is that difficult or interesting, really. there's two basic ways to think about it: as a matter of style, ethics is concerned with how should i live, where morality is concerned with what not to do. same questions, inverted ways of framing the sentences generated in response. past that, you have differing conceptions of agency. morality tends to come out of religious frameworks which tend to be about social control, whence prohibitions as the basic mechanism. the reason the dyad seems operative these days is as a function of the morality/religion association. it wasn't always like that.
the rigorous-ish deontology is from kant. deontology is basically the attempt to deduce ethical principles from a kind of hardwiring, which in the end is dependent on a god, but which doesn't require that god to be operative.
that the op is calling for basically is a "scientific" deontology. there''s still schools within ethics that like deontology--typically the members are christian, but it's not universal---it seems that these folk imagine themselves hans brinker standing with their thumb in the breach of the dyke of human irrationality. if they gave up on the framework and pulled out their thumb, bad things would happen. so as with most christians, there's a really cynical view of agency involved with this. fallen, corrupt humans need Rules else everything turns to shit. once again, nietzsche was right.
i dont personally think that ethics or morality is a particularly useful or interesting category. ethics are political expressions, so the category that interests me more is the political.
o, and alot of the stuff you read that references complex dynamical systems modelling in the context of ethics is concerned with trying to show that c-d-s- models are amenable to traditional ethics in order mostly not to freak out conservatives too much. the results, from what i've read, are variably interesting---the problem is that c-d-s poses very basic challenges to the notion of agency that traditional western ethics presupposes. so it really is a watering down and playing nice for the retro-set. the other problem surfaces through what i've just said tho: if i argue that ethics is a problem, what i mean is the approach to thinking about the subject matter in philosophical terms, not the idea of self-limitation as such. that i felt compelled to say that shows where the problem is.
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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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