Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Not necessarily. Virtue ethics, for example, typically includes prudence as one of the virtues, and indeed some virtue ethicists (Thomas Aquinas is one) make it the summation of all the virtues. But prudence is the ability to make judgments about x and y in the fashion you describe, and to act according to those judgments—but not in the formulaic, mathematical way that "utilitarianism" suggests, because in the real world we hardly ever have sufficient information to perform such calculations. (And also, virtue ethics typically is about "will this lead to my own happiness?" rather than about "the greatest good of the greatest number.")
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Of course, description of ethical systems are not binary dichotomies, and what you describe seems consistent with my mention of the 'utilitarian/
consequentialist stance' in the quoted post. Specific examples of action-evaluation systems can have consequence-evaluating postulates -
they're not ideal platonic forms with zero additives.
Then again, my grasp on virtue ethics is far from the firmness I'd like it to have, to the point that to me Buddhism looked like a deontology-leaning, not a virtue-leaning religion, during my first attempts to examine its texts.