Is it possible that your definitions of consequentialist and virtue ethicist overlap? Consequentialism tells you to take the actions that will result in the greatest expected good, but it does not necessarily follow that the greatest expected good is obtained by doling out punishments and rewards to other people based on the immediate consequences of their actions.
Examples:
People’s abilities seem to have a great deal of natural variance which is beyond their conscious control, but rewarding or punishing them for things they can’t control doesn’t actually provide any beneficial incentives or feedback. It might be beneficial to replace any failure, but it’s only beneficial to chastize failures due to corruption or laziness, not incompetence.
When two people perform the same action because of differing motives, the consequences of that action may be the same, but the information conveyed about their likely future actions is different.
Good short-term consequences may be bad long-term mechanism design. The very concept of “virtue” can be seen as a way to look towards the long term, weighing the expected utility not just of an immediate count of lives but also of the changed incentives that make many more people more or less likely to put themselves or others in harms way in the future.
Is it possible that your definitions of consequentialist and virtue ethicist overlap? Consequentialism tells you to take the actions that will result in the greatest expected good, but it does not necessarily follow that the greatest expected good is obtained by doling out punishments and rewards to other people based on the immediate consequences of their actions.
Examples:
People’s abilities seem to have a great deal of natural variance which is beyond their conscious control, but rewarding or punishing them for things they can’t control doesn’t actually provide any beneficial incentives or feedback. It might be beneficial to replace any failure, but it’s only beneficial to chastize failures due to corruption or laziness, not incompetence.
When two people perform the same action because of differing motives, the consequences of that action may be the same, but the information conveyed about their likely future actions is different.
Good short-term consequences may be bad long-term mechanism design. The very concept of “virtue” can be seen as a way to look towards the long term, weighing the expected utility not just of an immediate count of lives but also of the changed incentives that make many more people more or less likely to put themselves or others in harms way in the future.