/lit/ - Literature

>>11447421
I'm honestly still in the process of trying to formulate ethics for myself that fits that gut feeling of mine that I believe we all work off of.
In general, virtue ethics seems only tangentially related to morality. Virtues are only good insofar as instilling them as habits into yourself can further the good. But if a virtue, say, led to unnecessary slaughter quite reliably, then one shouldn't adhere to it. Overly tribalistic type virtues and indeed pacifistic ones could yield such things.
But I think the draw of virtue ethics is that it's very pragmatic. It knows that being good takes work. People should keep the idea of virtues, but contain it within other ethical theories.
What I have in mind, personally, is a deontological-consequentialist mix for foundations. No matter what form of consequentialist you are, there is some sort of theoretical statistic you wish to derive to determine what outcome was better between two actions. But that inherently removes the value of the individual from discussion. So we can imagine scenarios such as, for example, the accidental death of a bad rapper bringing overall joy. Then someone who murderers said rapper in a way that looked accidental would be said, by certain consequentialist metrics, to have done a good. But this seems to me, absurd, since the individual should have inherent value.
So I would advocate for having a consequentialist system where certain liberates and protections are afforded to individuals. Stuff like "furthering the good is only necessary to being good when doing so is at little cost to oneself" or "you shouldn't take from others just because it provided some good" or "respect the wishes of others toward themselves or their property." I.e., some means are bad, but we should be very concerned with ends such as health, overall wealth, and happiness.
I would also separate good people from people who do good, one is someone with good intentions behind their actions, the other being someone who creates good outcomes.
Where I'm troubled is in answering exhaustively every single end we should be aiming for and how to measure it, or deciding how to weigh between which may be more important in a given situation. Health, wealth, and happiness, for example, need to be capable of being collapsed to an overall statistic we call "the average good", which seems impossible to do without feeling arbitrary.
And there are also edge cases. If killing one person saves 3 lives, I feel I shouldn't kill the one person. But if it saves a million, I believe that number justifies it. Same could be said of theft or any other thing I can think of to deontologically prohibit. Where is that dividing line in the sand? I can't say.