Virtue ethics, rules, and consequences

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What does it mean to be ethical? There are three major frameworks to answer that question: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.

(In the following I will use the words ethics and morality interchangeably, since “ethics” comes from the Greek ēthos, meaning either character or custom, a word that Cicero, in De Fato 2.1, translated into Latin as moralis, meaning proper behavior as well as, again, custom.)

Virtue ethics was developed by Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics...