an astonishing conclusion

I suppose there's a confirmation bias at work somewhere in here for me.

But it seems to me that the only people who should do work in ethics as a field are people who are anti-social beings studying the behaviors of other human beings. Social creatures will rely too often on the established customs or traditions as being legitimate guideposts for ethical behavior, regardless of whether they are or not. Anti-social creatures will be prone to examine those behaviors for flaws and find their unpersuasive reasoning (ie, why is it that I don't comply with this behavior in my own life, or why do others not comply).

Naturally, I am myself highly anti-social. So it's possible that ethics for anti-social people rather than "ethics for dummies", as I call traditionalism in ethics, is an endeavour of self-justification rather than an illumination of the proper role of social rules and conformity to basic principles of justice (whatever those are). Still, it's hard to take "because I/he/she/God said so" as a convincing argument for most anybody to follow along with as the rule of morals and laws. I'd like to think that the anti-social ethicist is at least able to escape that chain of reasoning once in a while when the social reasoner is captured by it.