Difference Between Virtue Ethics And Consequentialism

Consequential ethics or Consequentialism is a normative ethic theory that makes the consequences of the act as its basis to categorize it either as right or wrong. It says that morality is all about finding the right “overall consequences” or what these actions bring about. Consequentialism’s ultimate goal would be positive outcomes such as happiness, freedom, and survival of our species. Consequential ethics determines the rightness and wrongness of an act solely by analyzing the costs and benefits of the action’s consequences. Consequentialism therefore overlooks the means used and actions done to produce the result, as long as the effect is desirable and favorable. Virtue ethics however, as another normative ethical theory, has a completely

In summary, these ethical theories are more specified concretely as: consequentialism as ultimately desiring maximization of happiness; deontological ethics as requiring rationality as part of the moral principles and; virtue ethics as an exercising of one’s virtues, a character trait that one needs to flourish and live well with. The difference between these three approaches in morality is based more on the way moral dilemmas are approached and attended to, instead of how moral conclusions are

As mentioned above, it is important that virtues are learned and developed in one’s youth. The family plays a significant role in rearing virtues to the youth as the basic unit of the society. However a child cannot be kept within that familial boundary. Children are then sent to school, exposed in an entirely new and different boundary, yet the closest to witnessing the society as a whole. So, as a nation trying to build its way up to development, the country needs positive and necessary virtues taught in schools at a very young age. Such virtues are respect, discipline, patience, selflessness, among others. Discipline is an essential virtue to the case of the country today as this is something that we clearly lack, effecting the gradual collapse and failure of our deontological ethics approach to the national issues at hand. It’s important that academic institutions instill these virtues as they impart vital knowledge and information and make education more humanistic and unifying to build a much better