This article addresses the struggle in contemporary moral philosophy between three major trends: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Consequentialism, mainly embodied in the utilitarian approach, and deontology, represented by the intuitionist frameworks of W.D. Ross and the Kantianism of John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, and Jürgen Habermas, have dominated contemporary debates in moral philosophy. However, in the early 1980s, a trend has emerged that calls for greater focus on the moral agent and her qualities and virtues rather than on actions and rules as in the case of the two prevailing trends. The proponents of this new approach, such as Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Slote, have presented updated theories of virtue ethics as an alternative to these schools.

This study therefore reviews the debate between consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, considering how each school evaluates actions, the rules of decision-making and the systems of argumentation on which they rely. It also investigates the consistency of the results to which their moral reasoning leads. Finally, it interrogates the extent to which contemporary ethical thinking needs a theory of virtue, and the degree to which virtue ethics in its modern form is able to provide an alternative to the other two approaches to ethical issues.