In general, I've seen philosophers "bucket" normative ethics into 3 primary categories:
- Virtue Ethics: Emphasize moral character
- Deontology: Emphasizes duties or rules
- Consequentialism: Emphasizes the consequences of actions
However, I would prefer to combine virtue ethics and deontology to create a binary distinction:
- Means: Virtue Ethics and Deontology
- Ends: Consequentialism
I'm not an expert philosopher by any means (heh), but this makes more intuitive sense to me. When we think about "how to do good", the 1st clear question is "are you thinking about your actions (means) or the outcomes of those actions (ends)?" For me, virtue ethics and deontology are two ways to think about your actions. i.e. Deontology—Do your actions align with some duty/rule? Or Virtue Ethics—Do your actions align with some moral character traits?
Questions:
- Is it actually true that philosophers (generally) give the 3-category version over the 2-category version?
- What am I missing about virtue ethics/deontology that implies I shouldn't categorize them both into "means"?
- Whatever the answers to #1 and #2, what do you find to be the most helpful categorical breakdown of normative ethics?
Thanks!
Honestly, the consequentialist/virtue/deontological division is not a complete categorization, just a list of the three most common theories; other moral theories simply fall outside of it. The Philpapers survey includes "other" as a fourth option to make a true categorization.
I haven't seen any philosophers use a means/ends binary categorization. But others are often used instead of the consequentialist/virtue/deontological division. For instance, there is the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction, and there is the thick concept centralism/thin concept centralism distinction. All can be more or less appropriate in different contexts. Overall, philosophers don't worry that much about this question of categorization, so don't worry too much about what they use.
I am not well read on virtue ethics, but it seems to me that both cole haus and richard ngo are right: some kinds of virtue ethics are about the end of achieving a certain personal character, and others are about having actions that align with the right principles.
In most contexts I would tend towards stressing something Parfit talks about, between traditionalism (though I forget the exact word he uses) and revisionism. The former being moral theories that try to preserve our ordinary folk moral beliefs, and the latter being moral theories that try to revise them to meet more rigorous principles. Because I think that a relatively high amount of moral disagreement boils down to this. But again there are multiple ways of making categories here, and there is not one universal best option, they are just useful in different ways in different contexts.