I’d suggest that we may be able to avoid moral injunctions of the sort that are often found wanting, and yet a need for what we might better call “ethical” considerations would remain. Ethical considerations would be those that involve something more than merely transactional interactions with others.
So I’m here invoking a differentiation between moral injunctions of the “Thou Shalt…” variety, and ethical considerations, were the wants and desires of others are taken into account in deciding what to do.
There’s good reasons to think that universal moral statements that bind us regardless of our circumstances quickly become incoherent. There will always be circumstances that outstrip any given Universal moral statement. Kant’s prohibition on lying shows this neatly.
While we might well be pleasure-seeking machines, we are also deeply embedded in our communal life. And you are right to draw attention to the tense of our utterances. While your considerations so far have been mostly in the first person, as communal beings we might give pause to consider utterances in the second and third person - that is, how our behaviour affects others, and how the behaviour of others affects us.
What do I want might be a beginning, but being communal actors, we must also ask what do you want, and talk about how my behaviour affects you, and yours affects me.
This leads us to broader considerations, as to how we might expect ourselves and others to behave more generally. This encompass recognising not just my own point of view, but that of the community, and what they might hold as reasonable or acceptable behaviour. While we might spurn universal moral obligations, we nevertheless have what we might at the least call communal expectations.
And I hope that we might agree that such communal values are more than just transactional. At the least, they involve what we might call character.
A story might help here. At an event at a Mar-a-Lago club, an elderly man fell from a stage, hitting his head, bleeding profusely. Trump later said
And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away… You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed colour. Became very red… I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he OK.
What do we make of the character of such a person? Not just of Trump individually - we might leave that aside - but of someone unwilling to overcome their own aversions in order to help someone in need?
And I hope that what we might show here is that there is more to our communal interactions than mere transactional reciprocity. That our orientation towards others is important, that a man is of more significance than a marble floor.
This is not yet an argument, of course, but an indication of a direction we might take.