Virtue ethics, rules, and consequences
A quick comparison among the three major frameworks for ethical living
What does it mean to be ethical? There are three major frameworks to answer that question: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.
(In the following I will use the words ethics and morality interchangeably, since “ethics” comes from the Greek ēthos, meaning either character or custom, a word that Cicero, in De Fato 2.1, translated into Latin as moralis, meaning proper behavior as well as, again, custom.)
Virtue ethics was developed by Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, and a number of other Hellenistic schools of thought. It is, arguably (but debatably) also present in some form in Eastern traditions like Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. If so, virtue ethics is one of the dominant ways to think about morality, particularly after the so-called “aretaic turn” (from arete, meaning virtue) in contemporary moral philosophy, which is usually traced to the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Often enough comparative discussions of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism go something like this: virtue ethics is about character; deontology is about duty and rules; and consequentialism is (obviously) about the consequences of one’s actions…
