i was thinking about ethics again the other day and began toying with this idea: ethical systems would be more effective (and accurate) if built into monetary systems, governments, corporations, school boards etc, than they are when considered to be rules for the conduct of individuals. To put it another way: systems of ethics are not for people, they are for systems. For people there are simply the causes and conditions of wellbeing as experienced subjectively. Wu wei would be one of those causes. Recognizing the psychological act of say making judgments about people (in the sense of "better than and worse than me") as a cause of constantly pendulating emotional discord in ourselves would be another cause of wellbeing.

The subject-object "split" with all it's connotations is rather odd to me, it doesn't seem to have any utility, and has some pernicious side effects. Subjective psychological experiences, qualities, and moods, have observable common causes. For example if i believe something but mistakenly assume that my belief is a fact i am more likely to feel angry or defensive when my belief is challenged than i would be if i had a belief that i knew was a belief. That can be said a couple of ways. In buddhist terms that could be described as ignorance of my own state of belief, and at the same time attachment to my belief. i do not get to choose that such a relationship to my own belief has those effects on my subjective experience of wellbeing. It does have those effects whether i like it or not, whether i think so or not. And as people we are engaged in these kind of errors all the time, even though we don't see it. So in that sense the causes of wellbeing and suffering are objective.

On the note of "what if murderers only experience wellbeing when they're murdering?" to paraphrase you, but i believe retaining your meaning, i think we will find that the fantasizing and following through with such acts of violence is a turning away from the internal turmoil within that person, and the mistaken projection of that turmoil onto others. Those are again observable psychological actions, of suppression or resistance, and projection, attachment, and ignorance of the causes of ones own turmoil. If my skin itches, and i take a histamine blocker instead of identifying the cause of the itch, that cannot solve the fundamental problem, and it will thus crop up again in the future either expressing through more itching or some other expression quite possibly worse than the original problem. Wellbeing just cannot be had going along that way.

If people who understood the causality of wellbeing were building systems that had the promotion of wellbeing as an ethical goal, well i think there is something to that... All our systems could look a lot different if approached that way, but that would be a lot different than telling people what they should do, it would be telling our systems, "Hey system you must be a steward of the causes of individual wellbeing to the extent that such causes exist within your domain."