Well, in reality, they're my best attempt to amalgamate what I've read from Christopher Lasch, Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and Freud. Essentially we are results of a will, as Schopenhauer calls it. From this will, all things in reality eventually come to be, each varying in their form of perfection.
Like the physical world, the abstract world, what we know and contemplate that isn't tangibly represented by objects in our field of vision, varyies in grades of perfection. Thus some justice is more ideal than other forms. And thats pretty much half of my ethical system: that some deeds are preferable to others because they're the ideal outgrowth of the will's perfect form of an act that provides justice, kindness, love, compassion, and so on.
The other half is where Aristotle and the others come in: ultimately a good deed is too much of nothing, but just the right amount. What Freud posited to be the structure of the psyche reinforces this because the ego is the middle ground between demands placed upon the individual from without and the id is composed of those from within. Therefore the just, virtuous person is one who mediates the two extreme ends of their psyche best; best meaning most ideal, and therefore closest to perfect.
And lastly Lasch comes in because he understood, as best as I've seen, that we must understand the limits we place on ourselves and we must make sure those limits are not so impossible that they become more than ideal, they become absolute perfection: a condition incapable of being achieved by human beings. So what we have to do is strive to be perfect human beings but understand what limits our nature and environment have beset us with. And we must never forget that becoming perfect is not the goal in itself, but the attempt to do so is the goal. This last point I've got from that Wallace quote about Kafka. But also, I got it from about a year ago when I contemplated what I perceived as some girls disullusionment; how she seemed to believe either in perfection or failure. I came out of that situation thinking that perfection is, as Mangum said, "endless revisions to say (or do) what I mean."
