At the turn of 20th century, moral theories became more complex and were no longer concerned solely with rightness and wrongness, but were interested in many different kinds of moral issues. During the middle of the century, the study of normative ethics declined as metaethics grew in prominence. This focus on metaethics was in part caused by an intense linguistic focus in analytic philosophy and by the popularity of logical positivism.
Normative ethical systems can generally be broken down into three categories: deontological, teleological and virtue ethics. The first two are considered deontic or action-based theories of morality because they focus entirely upon the actions which a person performs. When actions are judged morally right based upon their consequences, we have teleological or consequentialist ethical theory. When actions are judged morally right, based upon how well they conform to some set of duties, we have a deontological ethical theory.
Whereas these first two systems focus on the question “What should I do?” the third asks an entirely different question: “What sort of person should I be?” With this we have a virtue-based ethical theory – it doesn’t judge actions as right or wrong but rather the character of the person doing the actions. The person, in turn, makes moral decisions, based upon which actions would make one a good person.
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