Sort of! But not exactly. This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write a long post on for ages, and have given a few short impromptu presentations about.
Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are classifiers over world-histories, actions, and agents, respectively. They’re mutually reducible, in that you can take a value system or a value-system fragment in any one of the three forms, and use it to generate a value system or value-system fragment in either of the other two forms. But value-system fragments are not equally naturally expressed in different forms; if you take a value from one and try to reframe it in the others, you sometimes get an explosion of complexity, particularly if you want to reduce value-system fragments which have weights and scaling properties, and have those weights and scaling properties carry through.
Sort of! But not exactly. This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write a long post on for ages, and have given a few short impromptu presentations about.
Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are classifiers over world-histories, actions, and agents, respectively. They’re mutually reducible, in that you can take a value system or a value-system fragment in any one of the three forms, and use it to generate a value system or value-system fragment in either of the other two forms. But value-system fragments are not equally naturally expressed in different forms; if you take a value from one and try to reframe it in the others, you sometimes get an explosion of complexity, particularly if you want to reduce value-system fragments which have weights and scaling properties, and have those weights and scaling properties carry through.