Agreed.

I would say love, maybe. That's a loaded word, though. But of course ethics deals with love. We can look at it apophatically; @StreetlightX and I don't love each other. Should we? I think so. What would it take for love to sprout between us?

Well, ol Frankfurt in the book quoted in the OP makes the case that self love is the highest good from which virtuous behavior can originate. Do you think so?

You're both asking the wrong questions and posing the wrong distinctions. An object lesson in how not to talk about ethics.

I feel that that's the real issue. What does it mean to love oneself?

Elaborate! Discuss! Dream! Disagree! Join us, SLX!

So, according to Frankfurt, self love is disinterested care for oneself, if I recall correctly. Love generates it's own reasons according to Frankfurt. If your going to save someone in a lake and your wife or someone else is drowning, then love commands that you save the person you love from drowning. No questions asked.

Put it this way: paradoxes indicate a failure of thought, and say nothing - literally nothing - about their object. To the degree that Frankfurt's argument is simply a transposition of Meno into another register, the only 'systematic incoherency' at issue is Frankfurt's - just as Meno's paradox testifies to Plato's own incoherency - and nothing else. There are only negative conclusions to be drawn from the tripe quoted in the OP.

So, according to Frankfurt, self love is disinterested care for oneself — Posty McPostface

Disinterested; yes. This is the nugget I could never pull out of the Gospels; Can I love myself on my own? Can I care for myself the way I care for someone else whom I love? No, not at all. How do I do that?

Can you put it in layman's terms?

I don't really have an answer to the how part. I'm still rereading the book referenced in the OP.

Isn't the "how" the crux of love, though?

What do you mean? The how in self love is just a matter of acceptance, I suppose. How much are you willing to look past your faults and accept yourself and not judge yourself. Easier said than done...

In order to carry out a rational evaluation of some way of living, a person must first know what evaluative criteria to employ and how to employ them. — Harry Frankfurt

What's a rational evaluation, Harry?

I had thought “inchoate” meant chaotic or incoherent, until looking it up. Here’s the definition. (Sorry for the pedanticism)

adjective: inchoate
just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
"a still inchoate democracy"
synonyms: rudimentary, undeveloped, unformed, immature, incipient, embryonic; More
beginning, fledgling, developing
"their government should not interfere in the inchoate market forces"

That reflects my reaction to the quote in the OP. That some questions like “how shall we live” are too vague, too general. Not unimportant or unanswerable, just incomplete. Questions like that need further clarification, or need to be broken down into component parts. Like asking “where do we drive to?”
Where do you want to go? What do you want to see?

Just to be clear, I didn't call anyone here a monster. I don't for a second believe that most people, including those here, would, when confronted with a situation in which ethics is at play, treat that situation as a purely intellectual problem - even if they might say or even think otherwise. There is ethics in action, and there is what people think they are doing, the morning after.

One thing Frankfurt is right about is that ethical 'answers' are co-eval with ethical 'questions': and they are coeval because all ethics are the result of encounters which define the very questions which constitute the field of ethics. Ethics is not some kind of thought-game, some intellectual past-time for the bored and lonely, requiring some inane deliniation of pre-set 'criteria'. But this is not a 'fault' of ethics, a 'systematic incoherency', this is its pure consistency, through and through, compromised by all idiotic attempts to treat it categorically.

In order to carry out a rational evaluation of some way of living, a person must first know what evaluative criteria to employ and how to employ them. — Harry Frankfurt

That used to be the kind of question that religions and the religious aspects of philosophy - like virtue ethics, or stoicism - were thought to address. What is the good life? What aims to strive for? In any of the classical cultures, there was a body of literature about just these kinds of questions and their proposed solutions - in fact these were central to what culture is supposed to provide. Stoics, after all, were named after the porches from which they used to address their audiences, and these questions are just the kinds of questions that they would tackle. There were stories of heroes and epic dramas which re-told them. That was what 'culture' means. And if the question now seems 'inchoate' then perhaps that reflects a shortcoming of modern culture or the modern way of life. (Man walks past, looking at iPhone screen.....)

Actually an OP by David Brooks comes to mind, which was about a sociological survey of young adults attitudes to ethics. The main point was:

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

Which seems to speak of the same kind of problems that the passage quoted in the OP is aware of.

I think, basically, the problem is a kind of understated nihilism - not a sturm und drang kind of nihilism, but more like a shrug, a 'whatever' - which arises from the erosion of cultural ethics, the absence of meta-narratives and normative stories. We're all presumed to be responsible individuals, and yet the culture in which we live has abandoned or outgrown its orientating myths. 'Things fall apart'. In some ways, it is unavoidable, given the enormous rate of change of the world we're in. But I think it's correct to sense that it is in some sense an emergency.