Neither endocannibalism nor exocannibalism can be classified as murder per se: the first is a sign of respect/love for the already deceased; the latter usually follows warfare, and homicide during warfare is not considered to be murder (deliberate homicide without justification). — javra

These are not absolutes. Many people murder their loved ones... most murders involve domestic strife, and family members.

Murder, to use your definition, is deliberate homicide without justification. When soldiers kill each other, at least one side is fighting a non-defensive battle. Most if not all ethicists condemn wars of expansion and wars of aggression non-defensive, and therefore, non-justified. Therefore the soldiers on one side of every battle and every war commit murder when they kill a soldier of the opposing forces.

Therefore, as far as I can see, both exo- and endocannibalism involves murder and can't exist without it. UNLESS of course you eat parts of the body of your beloved, while they stay alive.

That has been known to happen, too, in at least sentimental novels, or in sentimental stories verbally passed on, where shipwrecks in a boat eat the arm or the leg of one of the survivors, one after another, until they get rescued or until they die of exposure.

Not sure what you are trying to address with this lengthy response. Seems like you are using phenomenology to distract from the original point, namely that we can build a robust ethical system on some basic ideas. If you think there is some transcendent aspect to this enterprise I have neglected, maybe it would help for you to describe it directly. — Tom Storm

Nor am I sure why this is so mysterious. This is a philosophical examination of an ethical case. The knife in the kidney is just an example. Nor is it anecdotal. It is descriptive, plainly.
Take a simple case: a person bludgeons another for her money. Why is this prima facie wrong? What is the most salient feature of this case?

Take a simple case: a person bludgeons another for her money. Why is this prima facie wrong? What is the most salient feature of this case? — Astrophel

I don't understand why we are talking about examples of a violent crime like we're a couple of high school students. :razz:

Are you able to tell me what point it is you are trying to examine?

It seems like you are struggling to understand what makes an action right or wrong.

I've already answered this question several times (albeit indirectly). My general position would be we should privilege the flourishing of conscious creatures. A violent action like this would go against that.

Now you have asked already - why privilege flourishing? If you are genuinely asking this then you are likely to be anti-social (sociopath). If you are asking for rhetorical purposes, there is, as I said earlier, no clear answer to this unless you are a believer in a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics as per Plato, where goodness, truth and beauty sit inside the logos waiting for us to enact them. Or you could come at it via a divine command theory of morality as per Islam and some forms of Christianity. These are the 'magical' answers I was referring to.

Other than that, we simply have to make personal choices regarding our behavior - we can be guided by virtue or malice. It's up to us.

I've already answered this question several times (albeit indirectly). My general position would be we should privilege the flourishing of conscious creatures. A violent action like this would go against that. — Tom Storm

this isn't an answer to a question that asks for the most salient features of something. I'm not asking what we should do or who should be privileged. And I didn't ask if violent actions are good or bad and why. It is far simpler: What is there in the descriptive features of an ethical case, like the one I provide? The should' and shouldn'ts are on hold until we can find out what it is that sits there in our perceptual midst that makes it ethical at all.

I do see that this sounds a little unfamiliar, but so what, the logic of the exercise is clear: I want to know about "the existence of ethics" (the OP). Existence, this is a "what is it?" question. All questions that have a long history of answers have a lot of extraneous analyses and question begging assumptions. But in all matters, the best policy is to begin at the beginning, which is always what is there in the world that gives rise to all the fuss in the first place. This is the originary ground. Ask me about the nature of, say, empathy, and I will say, well, let's look at exemplar cases of empathy and give analysis, and these cases will serve as a descriptive foundation that validates or denies relevance. If someone says to me empathy is a Godly virtue, I would say, wait; back up. Let's look at the concept of God. What is the material basis (I mean, the matters, there in the world, observable or apriori required), that is, the things in the world that gives rise to the concept, that give it meaning. Then we can determine if empathy is a Godls virtue.

The reasoning is simply that before we go on talking about shoulds and should nots, I would like to know what it is the drives the ethical engine, and that can be "observed" in the case itself. It is, if you will, right there on the sleeve of ethical issues, ignored because it is simply a given, and people don't argue about what is simply given.

The should' and shouldn'ts are on hold until we can find out what it is that sits there in our perceptual midst that makes it ethical at all. — Astrophel

I know that, but I'm saying that it doesn't become ethical until should and shouldn't or ought and ought not enter the frame. Ethics is about behaviour and how to be in the world with others.

If you want to go deeper than that, I am not sure there is a pool bottomless enough for that journey.

Agency comes, analytically, before inter-agency. — Astrophel

I'm not sure of that. Notions of self develop by understanding one's self in relation to the other. Hence one's own agency is only understood in contrast to the agency of others.

Look, you can't have an ethical relationship with a fence post. — Astrophel

Exactly.

introspection is the means by which all of the great ethical doctrines have been generated — Joshs

Is it? So much the worse for ethical doctrines, then.

I can’t imagine a better way to prepare oneself to answer any of the above questions. — Joshs

I con't imagine a worse way of dealing with an ethical issue than asking an armchair theorist with no hands-on experience.

I do quite a bit of disability advocacy, and have come to appreciate the need for lived experience in policy formulation, and the dignity in the slogan "Nothing about me without me!"

Your comment sounds awfully Cartesian: — Joshs

Now you are just being rude. :razz:

On the contrary I've argued for downplaying such juxtapositions as subjective and objective, internal and external, public and private. Each of us are embedded in a world that includes physical objects and other folk. Ethics is about acting in a public social world, like it or not, and that's where ethical thinking must take place.

I know that, but I'm saying that it doesn't become ethical until should and shouldn't or ought and ought not enter the frame. Ethics is about behaviour and how to be in the world with others.

If you want to go deeper than that, I am not sure there is a pool bottomless enough for that journey. — Tom Storm

But prior to what one does, one has to BE an agency of ethical possibilities. It is not bottomless at all. All one has to do is look to that which makes an agency of ethical possibility. A person is such an agency (so is a dog or a cat, but that is another matter). A person is, say, rational, but it is not rationality that constitutes ethicality in a person. Reason, Hume made clear, is an empty vessel, and cares not one stitch whether we all live, die, suffer, or anything else. What makes an agency is the capacity for caring, and caring must have something that is of value for it to be about. I care that I can get enough money to buy Haagen Dazs. Why? Because it is so delicious. What is deliciousness? Such an odd question, no? But all such affections go like this. And note that inquiry ends here, for there is no need to justify wanting something delicious, for to be delicious is inherently good, unassailably good. Of course, you can assail many things: can I afford it? Should I steal it? Is it healthy? This kind of thing can be as complicated as human affairs themselves. But: it is these affairs that make for complications, not the Haagen dazs's deliciousness.
Herein lies the essence of ethical agency.

I'm not sure of that. Notions of self develop by understanding one's self in relation to the other. Hence one's own agency is only understood in contrast to the agency of others. — Banno

It wouldn't be in contrast. To make this point, as someone like Herbert Meade does, it would be this exterior event, here, the relationship with others, that generates the essential conditions for ethical possibility, which is internalized into the structure of my ethicality. Meade thought this way about language: we witness models of language and behavior outside of us, and take these observed relations of others and internalize them, and this makes for the a construction of the internal sense of self, and the "relation" one has with oneself in the internal dialog (I talk to myself as a mirror structure to the talking witnessed around me. fascinating idea, really. Not complete, but there is certainly something to this). Your position sounds similar:

But then, examining oneself and the content therein as an internalized model would possess all that is required. Further, it is not the other and one's relationship with her that is going to reveal what it is that makes ethics what it is, for external models once internalized do not as models, exceed wht the external affair would be. IN other words, there would be nothing new apart from what is in the relationship.

No, there is something else entirely that runs this show that is presupposed by ethical problems of any kind.

care that I can get enough money to buy Haagen Dazs. Why? Because it is so delicious. What is deliciousness? Such an odd question, no? — Astrophel

No, I'm totally familiar with these sorts of games. I just don't think they bear fruit. An endless recursion of conceptual snipe hunting

Herein lies the essence of ethical agency. — Astrophel

Herein lies the essence of time wasting.

Ethics is about acting in a public social world, like it or not, and that's where ethical thinking must take place. — Banno

That's it in a nutshell - you're much better at this than I am.

The philosophical question is, how do we talk about ethics at a level where these incidentals are suspended so as to identify the "what is it?" of an ethical matter? — Astrophel

Isn't what you're looking for the summum bonum, that being 'the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system'?

Mead. Hmm. Hadn't considered his ideas in quite a while.

the internal dialog — Astrophel

Most of us have an inner voice, but if you're part of the minority who doesn't, this could be why

Inanimate objects can be beautiful. To defile that which is beautiful is evil. Morality is not just about life, humans or animals; it's also about the lifeless. Ethics is an ever-expanding bubble that's gonna swallow up the entire universe/multiverse. If you're good, your heart keeps the rhythm of the universe. :grin:

It is, if you will, right there on the sleeve of ethical issues, ignored because it is simply a given, and people don't argue about what is simply given. — Astrophel

Agreed. People love the cake they are given, but don’t bother considering its ingredients. That ethics manifests as a relation between humans is given, but without the bother of considering the humans which constitute the ingredients of it.

there is no need to justify wanting something delicious..... — Astrophel

Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious).

Now if the cause is left empty, and a superficial truth exemplified, if there is no need to judge a relative quality.....how is delicious or distasteful at all determinable? It must herein, be that the justification for the want, formerly posited as unnecessary, is given merely because it is delicious, which is the same as saying there is no reason for wanting something other than its quality. But to say there’s no need to judge an effect (the want) presupposes the judgement already made for its cause (its being delicious). Thus it is that “no need to justify” is superficial, because in truth, it contradicts itself.

It is fine to say an agent is effected by a want, but it shouldn’t be omitted that an agent is also a cause for the wanting.

And people don’t argue the given mostly because either the subtleties hidden within them are too difficult, or, they are simply not deemed to matter. The first is anthropologically lazy, the second, philosophically ignorant.

Herein lies the essence of time wasting. — Tom Storm

I blame myself, Tom Storm. I assumed you at least had a curiosity and a capacity to inquire. The trouble here is that you really don't know anything at all about continental philosophy, which is the implicit background to all this.

Do take note that in everything I said, there was never an attempt on your part to analyze the argument. Head scratching all the way through.

There are more graceful ways to deal with things you don't understand.

Inanimate objects can be beautiful. To defile that which is beautiful is evil. Morality is not just about life, humans or animals; it's also about the lifeless. Ethics is an ever-expanding bubble that's gonna swallow up the entire universe/multiverse. If you're good, your heart keeps the rhythm of the universe. :grin: — Agent Smith

Damned Agent! Apart from being funny you truly got stuff to say! Beautiful! You turned the blue skies blue again. The shadow on the closed curtain of two birds in the tree, just pointed to by my wife agree! :up:

Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious). — Mww

Just to pause on this. The structure of affectivity is twofold: A want, desire, appetite, fear, loathing and so on, can be questioned. Why do you want this? On the other side of this subjective, call it a deficit, there is the true object, the qualified existent, the phenomenon of deliciousness, say, or misery.

Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious). — Mww

Did I write "effect"? If I did it was a typo. What is in play is "affect".

As to the superficiality, consider: something being delicious is rather trivial, granted. But it belongs to the same order of things in which are found extraordinary magnitudes of experience. Like intense suffering. It is the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as value that I am saying is the essence of ethics. If there is nothing of this, then there is no ethics. It is more than a presupposition. Value is THE existential foundation of ethics, something existence "does"; we did not invent value, we invented culture and various foods and entertainment, and we struggle with each other over them (ethics) and so on, but this all has its grounding in the solid "givenness" of value-in-the-world. We are not principally ,to disagree with Descartes, res cogitans; we are res affectus, a "thing" of affectivity"

And by value, I mean Wittgenstein's value: the "impossible" goodness of something we call good. Non contingent goodness.

Yes, I actually believe this. I literally believe our ethical affairs are the Real affairs, in the fabric of things, so to speak. I do have my arguments. For me, they begin with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics. They end somewhere in Nagarjuna's Madhyamika.

One might know oneself best by looking in at one's reflection on the eyes of another. — Banno

:100: :fire:

As I have argued, a priori intuitions or any such introspection will not survive contact.

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.
— Mike Tyson

Hence virtue ethics - but that's a longer story — Banno

:smirk:

As I have argued, a priori intuitions or any such introspection will not survive contact.

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.
— Mike Tyson

Hence virtue ethics - but that's a longer story — Banno

:smirk: — 180 Proof

As Evander Holyfield can attest to, many do have a plan for when they are punched in the mouth – and can cope ethically enough even when their ears are unexpectedly bitten off by dumbass assholes. But we’re championing the dumbass’s affirmation as sound by placing it in boldface?

Question: What is “virtue”?
Answer: You know it when you see it.
Second Question: How so? For example: Why is Tyson’s boldfaced statement deemed virtuous, if it is?

I con't imagine a worse way of dealing with an ethical issue than asking an armchair theorist with no hands-on experience.

I do quite a bit of disability advocacy, and have come to appreciate the need for lived experience in policy formulation…

Ethics is about acting in a public social world, like it or not, and that's where ethical thinking must take place. — Banno

Someone sitting in an armchair thinking can’t tie their shoe or repair an engine while contemplating. And when they are done contemplating they can’t do these things without actual experience in these areas. But hands-on experience is impossible without a network of constructs formed from prior experience providing the larger framework of intelligibility , motivation , relevance and goal
orientation for specifically applied actions in the world.
Our hands do the work but they are just appendages and tools. Our framework of understanding gives the work its sense and direction. If you select 10 people and put them into the same hands-on applied situation , you will get 10 different perspectives on the ‘same’ situation. This fact may not become apparent for a while, because the very specificity of the ‘real-world’ situation masks these differences in interpretive outlook. It may seem as thought the larger interpretive framework that we tap into in introspection is the abstract and genereral way of understanding things and the real-world, hands-on, specifically applied actions are real nuts and bolts of meaning, but it is quite the opposite. Sizing someone up on the basis of such concrete actions gives one a vague and ambiguous sense of what they are doing and why they are doing it when we try to divorce observation of behavior from the larger background perspective of the person.

The least effective way to promote positive change in the world is to put blinders on and treat persons as if they were merely stimulus bound creatures of concrete action. The best way to change the world is to creatively transform the worldviews animating and guiding our subordinate hands-on skills. This is what introspection does. Certainly it needs to be translated into concrete action, but the feedback from such actions have much less of an effect on the overall worldview than directly confronting the whole framework.

Of course, you can examine ethics from different angles, in different ways, conceptually, practically, religiously, philosophically, as a field of study and so on. However, I think what is most;y needed is to describe the essence of ethics and the usefulness of its application in everyday life, which, I believe, is the following:

Ethics is the support of survival and well-being. It is also their protection, promotion and enhancement. It is applied on many levels or spheres: individual (person), family, groups and humanity. One is higher and larger that its previous one. These are best represented as concentric spheres. An action is as ethical as it does more good to a larger number of people on these spheres. (By "good" I mean of course "in favor of, supporting well-being".)

One might know oneself best by looking in at one's reflection on the eyes of another.
— Banno
:100: :fire:

As I have argued, a priori intuitions or any such introspection will not survive contact.

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.
— Mike Tyson

Hence virtue ethics - but that's a longer story
— Banno
:smirk: — 180 Proof

We understand you are enamoured by Banno and his opinions in philosophical discourses. That's fine. But do you have any original ideas to share, as well? Or you are satisfied to just praise Banno.

Bah! I have my own philosophy groupies as well. Not on this forum, however. I gotta get me some.

An action is as ethical as it does more good to a larger number of people on these spheres. (By "good" I mean of course "in favor of, supporting well-being".) — Alkis Piskas

I agree that it's a good definition of self-sacrificial ethics. However, I also maintain that the ultimate spring and origin of ethics is the survival of the individual and/or the survival of his DNA derivatives.

The circles you mention are all part of the ethical individual's wish and actual efforts to make survive. However, it is not necessarily his outright interest in that order; and his personal ethics may be skewed in the sense of what expectations society places on him, because of the discrepancy between his agenda and society's agenda.

Isn't what you're looking for the summum bonum, that being 'the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system'? — Wayfarer

I think I agree somewhere in there. Do I think we are "going somewhere" with all this struggling and dealing with a world of glorious beauty and wretched misery? Almost afraid to say this because it is not received well in modern "enlightened" thinking, but yes, I do think this, but my reasons are very difficult to understand. I don't understand them all that well---a good sign, I want to add, that I have the openness or freedom to make thought out of a world of threshold uncertainties. I think, above all, this is the difference between analytic and continental philosophy. The latter puts philosophy IN that marvelous world of existential aporia. The death of philosophy is dogmatism.

I think this because Kierkegaard was right: actuality and reason are a train wreck. Kierkegaard fought against Hegel who wanted to place existence in a ordered realm of reason's historical progress. My take on this is, not the qualitative difference between wht is actual and what is rational, for what is actual as actuality, qua actual, does not deliver the goods. Actuality cannot be released from the ideas that make it meaningful; there is nothing in the actual, again, AS actual, that warrants the distance Kierkegaard wants to place between them. But there is distance, and this is measured in affectivity, not actuality; or, affect-in-actuality is what makes the train wreck. There is no wreck sans value.

What attracts me to philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is, in their own way , there is this dethroning of empirical science, which turns foundational analyses of the world into a baron waste land (reminds my of T S Eliot's Wasteland. Of course, people got very angry over his conservativism, but there is a ring of truth in his complaint that the old order of the truth and glory of God was being replaced by something soulless, and the gravitas of being human was being lightened by a trivializing social network {women come and go; talking of Michelangelo} --sound familiar?-- He had obviously read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety); and a placement of meaning front and center ontologically (though, I don't follow Nietzsche, I don't like where he goes, regardless of how well his critiques hold up).

But for me, meaning, front and center in our assessment of our affairs at the most basic level of assumptions completely rearranges the ontological furniture. The old Cartesain order of res cogitans and res extensa is out the window. Now what rules is res affectus. This is my ontology (remember, it is a work in progress).

What does this have to do with the summum bonum? Happiness, love, joy, bliss are elevated to principle ontologies, as are misery and the rest; but wait!: It is not just wishful fantasizing. Consider that the ground for all metaphysics has to be in the affairs witnessed in the world's phenomena, and here there is nowhere to be found any God of redemption. But what we do see is good and evil. What ARE these in their phenomenological "presence"? This goes to actual conditions, I mean, evil is not an abstract concept; it is there, in the agonizing sprained ankle. And good? This bliss in the Ravel, MIles Davis (whoever): these now may ascend to a foundational status. A metavalue affirmation. Our affairs are no longer local events delimited by a science's categories (which are fine things, of course).

Out on a limb. But human understanding is out there as well.

Ethics is the support of survival and well-being. It is also their protection, promotion and enhancement. It is applied on many levels or spheres: individual (person), family, groups and humanity. One is higher and larger that its previous one. These are best represented as concentric spheres. An action is as ethical as it does more good to a larger number of people on these spheres. (By "good" I mean of course "in favor of, supporting well-being".) — Alkis Piskas

But then, well-being is no more explanatory than good.

Anyway, there is a book you might find interesting by Oldenquist, called "Non suicidal Society". He talks in concentric level s of ethical obligation as well, only his thinking was the converse of yours: ethical obligations were stronger in the immediate social world. So, familiy comes before country, country before world; that kind of thing.
Anyway, your seem to be looking at utility to determine ethical choices. Like most people, I think this is very often right, and we do this all the time. Deontologists like Kant point to duty, but how does one determine duty? Isn't this bound up intimately with utility?
I use the principle of utility all the time. But remember utility's nay sayers: the hedonic gluttons, e.g.: one person's agony can be bliss for many others (pleasure gluttons), and the calculation for this favors the latter over the former. But clearly, we cannot condone bad treatment of one just to satisfy the balance of utility.
The problem with utility is that people are not quantifiable entities. There is a sovereign "right" one has over the public good. This asks for argument. Also, notwithstanding Bentham's hedonic calculator, heterogenous pleasures and pains cannot be quantified can they???.

Inanimate objects can be beautiful. To defile that which is beautiful is evil. Morality is not just about life, humans or animals; it's also about the lifeless. Ethics is an ever-expanding bubble that's gonna swallow up the entire universe/multiverse. If you're good, your heart keeps the rhythm of the universe. :grin: — Agent Smith

Sure.

So follow through on that example. We have, perhaps, an awe inspiring cave, which someone decides to destroy. Sure, destruction fo the cave is annoying.

What would take the destruction away from just annoying into the realm of being evil? What moves the act beyond the merely irritating into the immoral?

Or are we to say that morality is just what you like and dislike? I don't think that captures the way we use the term, and I suspect you would agree.

If you do good, your heart keeps rhythm with the universe. It's that stretching out beyond the self, that capacity to see a bigger picture than what one likes or dislikes, that forms the distinction between ethics and mere appetite.

And that extension past the self is why armchair ethicists fail, . Name those who have had the greatest moral consequence. Not Kant, the archetypal conservative who deduced the moral superiority of his comfortable middle class lifestyle from first principles. Gandhi; de Klerk and Mandela; King; folk who are active, but who also articulate their stance.

What attracts me to philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is, in their own way , there is this dethroning of empirical science, which turns foundational analyses of the world into a baron waste land (reminds my of T S Eliot's Wasteland. Of course, people got very angry over his conservativism, but there is a ring of truth in his complaint that the old order of the truth and glory of God was being replaced by something soulless, and the gravitas of being human was being lightened by a trivializing social network {women come and go; talking of Michelangelo} — Astrophel

My reading of modern philosophy is patchy. I did two undergrad years and subsequently more reading, as part of my own philosophical quest, but that was counter-cultural in orientation, I'm a 60's person. I always regarded philosophy as taught at University with suspicion because I felt the mainstream of Western culture had lost touch with the original meaning of enlightenment. At the time, in my early-mid twenties, my heroes were Alan Watts, D T Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharishi and Theodore Roszak - as I said, counter-cultural, not religious in the mainstream sense. (One of Roszak's books was called Where the Wasteland Ends, although I don't know how well it will have dated.)

While an undergrad, I had the distinct impression that post-Enlightenment philosophy was principally formed by a tacit commitment to Anything But God. There were kinds of ideas, styles of thinking, that had fallen out of favour because of their association with religion. At the time, the professor of the department was one of the Australian materialist philosophers, and I always thought that materialism was the work of the devil (figuratively, of course).

So - I very much see the course of modern intellectual history as the almost complete loss of the meaning of soul, which has been replaced with various forms of neo-darwinian materialism. It treats mankind as an objective phenomenon, something to study, alongside ants and whales, and has no greater conception of what matters that what works in an instrumental sense. "Chemical scum", as Stephen Hawkings once put it eloquently. (Oddly, this kind of attitude is sometimes dignified with the term 'humanism'.)

Whereas I see the great traditions of philosophy (and in my world, those are Christian Platonism, Indian Advaita, and Mahāyāna Buddhism) as representative of the philosophia perennis, and charting the course towards self-realisation. You do find inklings of that in Kierkegaard, and Heidegger wrestles with it in his own secularist kind of way, although I could never see it in Nietszche (flak jacket on.)

So after that long preamble, what of the summum bonum? I see the grand religious narratives as symbolic an allegorical presentations of the journey of self-realisation, variously conceived and envisaged in different cultural milieu. But that self-realisation, in my lexicon, is possible due to the sense in which h. sapiens is the Universe become aware of itself. We're not simply the epiphenomenal byproducts of dumb material stuff, as the secular academy must assume, absent any meta-narrative of their own. As stated splendidly in one of Albert Einstein's late-in-life musings, by way of a letter of condolence:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. — Albert Einstein

If you do good, your heart keeps rhythm with the universe. It's that stretching out beyond the self, that capacity to see a bigger picture than what one likes or dislikes, that forms the distinction between ethics and mere appetite. And that extension past the self is why armchair ethicists fail.

Name those who have had the greatest moral consequence. Not Kant, the archetypal conservative who deduced the moral superiority of his comfortable middle class lifestyle from first principles. Gandhi; de Klerk and Mandela; King; folk who are active, but who also articulate their stance. — Banno

I suspect that de Klerk et al are basically Kantian in their moral stance.
Keeping rhythm with the universe doesn’t just mean seeing a bigger picture. It’s not about how much of the furniture of the universe you incorporate into your soul or understanding , but how you organize that experience. We will continue to hate and attack to the extent that we aren’t able to relate to, empathize and identify with what would otherwise appear to us as alien and threatening others who we have to defend ourselves against. The ‘self’ isn’t an object among objects, it’s a synthetic activity, always going beyond itself in order to continue to be itself. So the challenge isn’t for the self to go outside of itself, since it is always already doing that. The challenge is how it is able to make sense of the new events it is moving into. If it goes beyond itself in such a way as to see a bigger picture consisting of malevolent, greedy and selfish actors, it is likely failing to organize the larger picture it has stretched itself into in a way that will help it be act insightfully, peacefully and harmoniously with others. 90% of that bigger picture is already in your head. Reflective and introspective discovery directly expands one’s world. That’s why brilliant novelists can contribute so much to ethical thought even though they spend most of their life in an armchair. Thinking doesn’t just recycle what has already been. It can create what has never existed in the world before.

I suspect that de Klerk et al are basically Kantian in their moral stance. — Joshs

Which is to say very little; perhaps that they were consistent.

And again, the point is to act.