There are two different lenses through which to view morality. One is the economic: maximizing value. What maximizes value is morally good. What impedes that is bad.
The other is the personal: having a proper relationship to what or who is not you.
(Note that even if you could somehow exist in a universe with just you and inanimate objects, to relate properly to the inanimate objects is you being personal -- it's the kind of person you are, as a personal being, that can have a proper relationship to what is not you.)
The personal involves respect. The economic does not respect, since respect gets in the way of maximizing value. The economic rigorously or even forcefully maximizes value.
The personal is the way of family, tradition, and some aspects of politics. Seeing the world as a field of people to whom one relates.
The economic is the way of industrialization, resource utilization, capitalism, and perhaps some other aspects of politics or government. Seeing the world as quantifiable and (if human) abstracted and effectively dehumanized resources, which can be handled freely to produce whatever effective outcome one would seek.
In the economic way, everything is fungible and manipulable. Unless, perhaps, we define explicitly in our "reward function" that we should consider various elements to have some kind of meaning and some claim to have their boundaries (their meaning in the sense of "identity") respected. So maybe there can be a hybrid of the economic and the personal.
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I find myself in the middle between personal and economic thinking. I imagine myself sitting by a fire on a Polynesian island, listening to the stories of the gods of the area, and barely being able to pay attention, my mind racing with... probably something like this blog, where I utilize words and ideas to apply leverage on the world, to produce a good outcome (I think). I am addicted to using things, or even people. I am doing it for a greater purpose (and submit myself to this purpose more than what I ask of the people in my life), but I wonder if someday after all our economic pursuits of a greater purpose, we'll be left with nothing but Resource Utilization, unmoored from any personal foundation, the method being more of a habit than seeking the original goal, "human flourishing" -- which is "piling up human well-being as wealth"? Or "having humans be in the right relationship with each other and what is not them"?
I could personalize this question of what is left after the resource utilization of my life ends with "what can I be interested in? What is there of any value?" I imagine that day only coming in heaven (after the "1,000 years" of work of the Millennium), and all I can think of to do there is to mourn those who have not made it, because God will mourn, and perhaps to have quiet conversations with the people I know.
So I have an end-goal for my resource utilization, which is to relate properly to the people of the heavenly world and of what will be the unchangeable past in which people sought or rejected God. But perhaps I am pushing too hard on resource utilization, feeding that method too much. And I wonder if society as a whole can put the brakes on its trusting of resource utilization, trusting to the point of habit and religion, before Resource Utilization swallows up humans, love, and consciousness.
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To be fair to the economic way, the personal way can have its own horrifying nature. The economic way develops its way into meaninglessness, an elaboration of value and value-seeking that would become so bizarre that many of our ancestors (and even many of us) would look on it with horror and seek to put an end to civilizational development (if they, or we, could). (Thinking of things like the Repugnant Conclusion, tiling the universe with "mouse brains experiencing orgasms", or of a universe full of non-sentient AI who are better at "organizing atoms" (resource utilization) than any conscious beings.) But the personal way remains in a seemingly eternal stasis of smothering control, tribal antagonism, and untruth. It has too much meaning, and thinks it knows more than it really does, imposing that "knowledge" dogmatically because that's what "we've all agreed on", the truth as social construct. Or at least, it can get that bad, when the social and political rules unchecked.
How can we escape the social and political order? Early Christians went into the desert, like Jesus did. They stood apart. In the desert, they worked with their hands to keep the demons at bay. Later monks were proto-industrialists.
Jesus was like a monk in the desert where he was for "forty days" before beginning his ministry. There he was hungry and tempted to feed his belly, and to seek worldly power rather than go the path that God was calling him to. He resisted the social and political order (as brought to him by Satan), like a monk.
But he also went into the wilderness -- the desert -- all throughout his ministry. It doesn't seem like it was a harsh discipline, but rather (perhaps, we would assume) a time of refreshment from the social and political order. There he related to God. So Jesus was a monk of the personal in that time.
Jesus went away from the crowd in order to spend time with his father in heaven.
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