Sorry. I have reacted only to a part of your previous comment, but not to your original argument. So, uhm, here is a bit silly scenario that examines agency:
There is a terrorist somewhere, holding your family as hostages. He announced that he is going to execute them in five minutes.
There are no policemen nearby, and they can't get there in five minutes. Luckily, there is one former soldier. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a gun with him. Fortunately, there is some other guy, who has a gun, but is not interested in the situation.
So, this soldier goes to the guy with a gun and asks silently: "Excuse me. We have this situation here, with only one terrorist, who is not paying good attention to what happens around him. Luckily, I was trained exactly for this kind of situation, and could reliably kill him with one shot. Could I borrow your gun, please? Of course, unless you want to do this yourself."
And the guy says: "Uhm, I don't care. I have no big problem with giving you my gun, but right at this moment I am watching a very interesting kitten video on youtube. It only takes ten minutes. So please don't disturb me, I really enjoy watching this video. We can discuss the gun later."
So the soldier, respecting this guy's agency, waits respectfully. Ten minutes later (after your family was executed, and the terrorist now has some new hostages), the video ends, the guy asks: "Sorry, what did you need that gun for?" "To kill a terrorist." "Yeah, no problem, take it." The soldier kills the terrorist and everyone goes home. I mean, except for the terrorist and your family; they are dead.
How happy you are about the fact that the soldier respected that guy's decision to finish watching the kitten video undisturbed? Imagine that there was an option that the soldier could inconspicuously turn off the wi-fi, so the guy would have paid him attention sooner; would that be an ethically preferable option?
The terrorist would be an agent diminishing the value of your scenario, so let's say a bear is mauling a friend of mine while the guy watching cats on the internet is sitting on his bear repellant. I could push the guy away and save my friend, which of course I would do. However, I'm still committing an infraction against the guy who's bear repellant I stole, I cannot argue that it would have been his moral duty to hand it over to me, and the guy has the right to ask for compensation in return. So I'm still a defector and society would do well to defect ag...
Preface
I have trouble expressing myself in such a way that my ideas come out even remotely like they sound in my head. So please apply the principle of charity and try to read how you think I thought of it.
Tit for Tat
Tit for Tat is usually presented in a game between two players where each chooses to either cooperate or defect. The real world game however differs in two important ways.
First, it's not a two player game. We make choices not only on our single instance of interaction but also on observed interactions between other players. Thus the Advanced Tit For Tat not only defects if the other player defected against itself but also if it could observe the other player defecting against any other player that employs a similar enough algorithm.
Second, there is a middle ground between cooperating and defecting, you could stay neutral. Thus you can harm your opponent, help him or do neither. The question of the best strategy in this real life prisoners dilemma is probably still unanswered. If I see my opponent defecting against some of my peers and cooperating with others, what do I choose?
Agency
The reason why there even is a game is because we can deliberate on our action and can take abstract thoughts into account that do not directly pertain to the current situation, which I think is the distinguishing factor of higher animals from lower. This ability is called agency. In order to be an agent a subject must be able to perceive the situation, have a set of possible actions, model the outcomes of these actions, value the outcomes, and then act accordingly.
We could act in such a way that infringes on these abilities in others. If we limit their ability to perceive or model the situation we call this fraud, if we limit their set of possible actions or their ability to choose between them, we call it coercion, if we infringe on their ability to value an outcome, we call it advertising.
Ethics
I propose that the purpose of our moral or ethical intuitions (I use the two words interchangeably, if there is a distinction please let me know) is to tell us whether some player defected, cooperated or stayed neutral, and to tell us who we should consider as having a close enough decision algorithm to ourselves to 'punish' third players for defecting against them. And I further propose that infringing on someones agency is what we consider as defecting.
Value Ethics
Utilitarians tend to see defecting or cooperating as pertaining to creation or destruction of values. (Edit:) Three things bother me about value ethics:
1. Valuations between different people can't really be compared. If we shut up and multiply, we value the lives of everybody exactly the same no matter how they themselves value their own life. If there are chores to be done and one person claims to "not mind too much" while the other claims to "hate it with a passion" we can't tell if the emotional effect on them is really any different or maybe even the other way round.
2. It makes you torture someone to avoid an insanely huge number of dust specs.
3. It makes you push a fat man to his death.
Agency ethics
Instead I propose that defecting in the real world game is all about infringing on someone's agency. Thus we intuit bankers who destroy an insane amount of wealth while not as good people still as neutral because they do not infringe on agency. At least that is my moral intuition.
So infringing on agency would make you a bad person, while not infringing on agency doesn't make you a good person. What makes you a good person is increasing value. Maybe agency is more fundamental and you cannot be a good person if you are a bad person, but maybe you can be both. That would create cognitive dissonance in people who consider ethics to be a singular thing and don't see the distinction, and that might be at the root of some ethics discussions.
Evil
In my version of ethics it counts as evil to push the fat man or to switch the tracks, as that would mean deliberately causing a death of someone who doesn't want to die. I would let the five die and not feel guilty about it, because I am not the cause of their deaths. I make a fundamental distinction between acting and not acting. If I hadn't been there the five would still die, so how could I be responsible for their deaths? I am aware that this view makes me evil in the eye of utilitarians. But I see less people acting consistent with utilitarianism than I see people arguing that way. Then again, this perception is probably heavily biased.
Conclusion
I don't really have a conclusion except of noticing that there exists a disagreement in fundamental morality and to inform you that there exists at least one person who considers infringing on someone's agency as defecting in a prisoner's dilemma.