Thanks for this great piece of writing. I like the way you mix personal narrative and philosophical reflection. I'll make a short comment about rules, because there we might have somewhat different perspectives.

What does it mean to say, with Val Plumwood, that we should abandon morality based on rules, and just go with moral feelings and conversation?

I'm basically in agreement with the "sentimentalist" tradition in ethics, which starts with the thought that we are a social, cultural species with an evolved psychology. This psychology consists of emotional dispositions, some of them pro-social, some retributive.

We constantly face new situations, so we are not just content to feel what we feel. We need to discuss things through. What do we do with that dialogue? Presumably we are going to formulate more general policies that are binding for all who are involved. What are these more general policies if not rules?

Explicit statement of a rule articulates a lot of regularity that we want to see in social practice. Our emotional psychology, and our common practices come first, and we can't make all of it explicit. But it's quite important to be explicit when we need to reason about our own policies, communicate them with others and so forth. So we will end up with a morality of rules after all. I don't see why one should be allergic to rules.

Rules obviously should come with commentary attached. What I have in mind is that we don't just want to hammer a set of rules to our children's heads. We also need to explain the rationale behind them. Traditional cultures did this with myths and stories.