There is an objection common to approaches to ethics of the sort I have been presenting. The objection goes as follows: you have given merely a formal criteria for ethics, which can be achieved trivially in a manner which we would not think was good. In terms of my account, one might say that unity can be accomplished by restricting oneself to very few beliefs, social groups and roles, and taking extreme care of one's health. An obsessive health nut, it seems, is an ideal according to my account. Well, I certainly do not want this consequence, and I agree that if my account has this consequence, then that is a reductio against my account.
How, then, do I answer this objection? First, I think MacIntyre, in Dependent Rational Animals, already offers a way to work from our actual embodied situation to at least a sketchy yet substantive ethics. A similar tactic is available to me: I, too, can note the way that rationality requires training, how we develop from dependency to independence through being raised in a culture, and how we are always already situated in a social world which provides roles and background beliefs from which we must begin our task of self-unification. Much of what follows is my way of putting what MacIntyre has already said.
Thus, we can point to the way that an obsessive health nut is dependent on health researchers, gym owners, and trainers, or to the fact that he must have been introduced to this kind of life by someone, and likely continues in it as a member of a group of people interested in health. He is thus required to cultivate beliefs, desires, and ways of acting which will contribute to his ability to take advantage of these resources for his goal of health. There will be an etiquette to the use of exercise materials, the need to gain help from others, and a duty to provide help to others. There will be pressure to learn about health and thus cultivate a moderate understanding of human biology.
One of the points I want to make here is that obsessive interests tend to metastasize into a field of interests. The athlete wants to understand how to be a good athlete, will tend to gain an interest in a particular form of athleticism, will want to understand the history of her activity, if only to glean tips from long-dead masters. To gain access to these fields, she will need an introduction, or at least an introduction to teaching oneself. If the athlete does not gain these interests, she will need to rely on others who do have these interests. In either case, she is now a member of a community of mutual helpers.
She will thus tend to be drawn into the lives of others, simply because she is interested in them as fellows in the project she herself is engaged in. This interest is due to our need to learn how to live from others. We learn how to live by watching others live. It is to our detriment to be self-obsessed, because then we will have no resources to draw from in navigating new problems in life. Supposing the athlete treats fellow athletes merely as resources, then she will be, not only a worse human for it, but a worse athlete. She will be spurned as not helpful. Others will cease to care about how she is as a whole person. Yet the whole person is relevant to athleticism. One's health is affected by things beyond pure athleticism. How her work affects what she can eat, how she can get exercise into her day, how her recovery from a sprain is affecting her emotional health, all are avenues which tend to lead to a concern for others as people, rather than merely as athletic machines. By spurning others, she loses out on learning of how to incorporate athletic practices into her particular day, because she loses the ability to see how others do it.
By hooking my ethics into our actual human constitution, I am able to overcome the objection to formal ethical systems. Further, by framing my ethics at a general level, I enable it to act as a framework for thinking about our particular constitution, and avoid the appearance of ethics being completely relative to a kind of constitution. Rather, the formal level provides substance when applied to a concrete constitution.
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