Ethics and morality in Dzogchen
Sorry if this is a naive question. Does Dzogchen say anything about morality or ethics, either new clarifications or just inherited from other previous schools? For example, consider such opinions as:
>Keown draws a distinction between “morality” and “ethics.” Buddhism has “morality”: lists of Thou-Shalt-Nots and of virtuous character traits. It has little or no “ethics”: broad principles which explain why particular actions and traits are good or bad.
What’s missing is justifications: the “whys” and “wherefores” that are the substance of Western ethics. Mostly, Westerners take the “whats” as given; we don’t need to be told not to kill, steal, and lie. That’s kindergarten stuff. What we want to know is how to use principles to resolve conflicting moral considerations.
Occasionally Buddhist texts give one-step explanations like “adultery causes suffering, so don’t do it”; that’s about as sophisticated an explanation as you get. Multi-step ethical reasoning is absent, and there’s definitely no overall system that makes sense of the moral details.
The Buddhist texts that are now interpreted as “ethical” are typically lists, which often seem miscellaneous, with no apparent structure. Often they mix, on an equal basis, items that seem “moral” and ones that don’t. Modern academic “Buddhist ethics” tries to infer principles from these texts, but this seems artificial and forced.
https://vividness.live/traditional-buddhism-has-no-ethical-system
>Here Dzogchen bites the bullet, where Mahayana obfuscates. Emptiness does mean that no ethical system can work. However, “emptiness” does not mean “non-existence.” Morality is unavoidably intangible, fluid, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. It cannot be captured by rules, principles, or lists of virtues. But this is not ethical nihilism. The activity of the Dzogchen practitioner is spontaneously beneficent.
https://vividness.live/emptiness-form-and-dzogchen-ethics
Do these quotes make sense at all or is it a superficial understanding and just an opinion? I understand that an enlightened being can behave morally from the natural state by default, but most people are not like that and still live in the relative world. And sometimes we may cause suffering unintentionally. Does the Eightfold Path have some underlying reasoning, or is it simply a list, or does it not matter in Dzogchen? And sometimes acts of kindness can cause a bit of suffering in others at the start, no?
If morality is fluid and empty, does this mean we should evaluate every situation case-by-case intuitively and therefore all fixed systems of ethics and rules (such as were developed by westerners) are wrong/"forever incomplete" and silly because there can be no universally applicable system? Can it be put into words? I want to study teachings about this topic