Meanwhile, I think you're dismissing as irrelevant what you are describing as protocols.

By protocol I mean bon-ton. Etiquette. However you want to call it. A lot of "thank you"s we say are somewhere on the same level of gravity as is using your silverware in the right order: there's a social gravity to a faux pas, but it's largely morally empty.

My point isn't that protocol is irrelevant (I don't hold that view at all), but only that it doesn't reflect the moral content of interactions, or people's ethical values for that matter.

they are subject to negotiation

I agree with you about the tacit "negotiation" that occurs on that level, but the whole of my original comment is about abstract ethics. Those are, in the ultimate analysis, dogmatic for every person. When you boil down your personal ethics to the very core principles, you'll hit a dogmatic ground, something you won't be able to explain further. You'll see that you start from a series of oughts, none of which has any further grounding. Whether it's morally dutiful to accomodate weakness can be resolved by one such ought, in either direction. My point was that most people answer "yes", rather than "no", and that this has a series of consequences both intellectual and practical.

And that if you want me to entertain the idea of a deontological framework beyond what you are calling protocols, you have a ton of heavy lifting to do, and you haven't even really started yet.

I'm not trying to convince you of any particular ethical perspective, only of the non-equivalence of abstract ethics (one's value system, how one ethically parses the interactions) and social protocol (one's visible behavior, that may or may not adequately reflect any values).