[TimorousBestie]

The best statement of virtue ethics is contained in Alasdair Macintyre’s _After Virtue_. It’s a metaethical foundation that argues that both deontology and utilitarianism are incoherent and have failed to explain what some unitary “the good” is, and that ancient notions of “virtues” (some of which have filtered down to present day) can capture facets of that good better.

The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.

[glenstein]

Probably a topic for a different day, but it's rare to get someone's nutshell version of ethics so concise and clear. For me, my concern would be letting the evolutionary tail wag the dog, so to speak. Utility has the advantage of sustaining moral care toward people far away from you, which may not convey an obvious evolutionary advantage.

And I think the best that can be said of evolution is that it mixes moral, amoral and immoral thinking in whatever combinations it finds optimal.

[TimorousBestie]

Macintyre doesn’t really involve himself with the evolutionary parts. He tends to be oriented towards historical/social/cultural explanations instead. But yes, this is an issue that any virtue ethics needs to handle.

> Utility has the advantage of sustaining moral care toward people far away from you

Well, in some formulations. There are well-defined and internally consistent choices of utility function that discount or redefine “personhood” in anti-humanist ways. That was more or less Rawls’ criticism of utilitarianism.