Forever ago, I took an ethics course where they talked about deontological and teleological ethics. These forms of ethics look at the ethical implications of an action, and in one case they are looking at whether the action itself is moral or immoral, and in the other case it is looking at the consequences of the action as being moral or immoral (morals and ethics aren’t really the same thing but I’m using the interchangeably here)

So in doing a thorough analysis of the graysonian ethic, one of the things that came out was that it isn’t really either. It doesn’t really talk about specifics of how to come to a certain decision about whether an action is good or evil, instead it talks about becoming the sort of person who is virtuous enough to make the decision for himself.

This actually makes a whole lot of sense. The world is complicated, and yesterday is not today and today is not tomorrow, the circumstances that we live under can change in a heartbeat. Any equation that you build trying to be able to determine if an action itself is good or evil will come up short. Is confluence of things that talk about what is ethical, there is one part biology and the fact that we are human, there is one part environment in the culture we live in and the world we live in, and there’s one part choice and how we choose to live our lives and what we choose to value. Those three things are each infinitely complicated. Points of view that appeared to be correct can turn out to be incorrect, or they can turn out to have been correct at the time but then the world changed. Or your personal circumstances changed.

So in this sense, that’s where virtue ethics seem to make more sense. Instead of trying to come up with an overreaching equation to find the answer to all life, you just focus on becoming a virtuous person and then follow your conscience. Then you can be confident that rather than being stuck in a dogmatic math equation that is wrong because the circumstances that the math equation was developed under changed, you can walk through life experiencing it and making value judgments on the fly based on your inherent virtue as a person who has cultivated that virtue.