Compare and evaluate consequentialist, deontological and virtue-based theories of normative ethics

What this dot point is asking

You need to define each theory, show how it would decide a moral case, and evaluate the theories against one another using clear reasons.

Consequentialism

Consequentialism holds that the rightness of an action depends only on its consequences. The best known version is utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham proposed the greatest happiness principle: the right act maximises pleasure and minimises pain, measured by a hedonic calculus. John Stuart Mill refined this by distinguishing higher (intellectual) from lower (bodily) pleasures, arguing that quality, not just quantity, matters.

Its strength is impartiality and practicality. It treats everyone's wellbeing as equally important and gives a clear decision procedure. The main objection is that it can license intuitively monstrous acts. If framing an innocent person would prevent a riot and produce more total happiness, naive utilitarianism appears to endorse it. It also struggles with the demandingness objection, since maximising overall good may require enormous personal sacrifice, and with predicting consequences reliably.

Deontology

Deontology holds that some actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of outcome. Immanuel Kant grounded ethics in reason and the categorical imperative. One formulation says: act only on a maxim you could will to become a universal law. A second, the formula of humanity, says: treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a means.

For Kant, lying is wrong even to save a life, because a universalised maxim of lying would be self-defeating and would use the deceived person merely as a means. The strength here is that it protects individual rights and explains why some acts feel forbidden whatever the payoff. The classic objection is rigidity. Refusing to lie to a murderer at the door strikes most people as wrong, and Kant gives no clear way to resolve conflicts between duties.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics, rooted in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, asks not what makes an act right but what makes a good person. The aim of life is eudaimonia, usually translated as flourishing. We achieve it by cultivating virtues, which are stable traits lying at the mean between extremes. Courage, for example, sits between cowardice and recklessness. The virtuous person uses phronesis, or practical wisdom, to judge what a situation demands.

Its strength is realism about moral psychology and motivation. It accounts for the role of habit, emotion and upbringing, which rule-based theories often neglect. The main objection is that it offers little action guidance. Telling someone to act as a virtuous person would act does not say clearly what to do in a hard case, and different cultures praise different virtues, raising worries about relativism.

Evaluating the theories

A strong response does not just describe the theories but weighs them. Consequentialism captures the intuition that outcomes matter, yet it can override justice and individual rights. Deontology protects those rights, yet its absolutism can produce harmful results and unresolved conflicts of duty. Virtue ethics restores attention to character and motive, yet it can seem vague and culturally variable.

Many philosophers therefore adopt hybrid or refined positions. Rule utilitarianism judges acts by rules that generally maximise welfare, blunting the framing objection. W. D. Ross proposed prima facie duties that can be weighed against one another, softening Kantian rigidity. The mark of a good philosophical answer is to acknowledge that each theory tracks a genuine moral insight while testing it against counterexamples such as the trolley problem.