Virtue Ethics, Deontology And Utilitarianism

There have been scholars who have Normative ethics: conventional ethical theories: Virtue ethics, Deontology and utilitarianism.
Virtues ethics focuses on the person not the act. Virtue ethics de-emphasises rules, consequences and acts.
Aristotle agreed with Socrates and Plato that virtues are central to a well-lived life. He believes that an ethical person was the man of virtues. Virtue is the mean between two extremes.

There is no univocal definition of ethics which is also known as moral philosophy. For some people ethics is a code of conduct, and yet for others it is a form of etiquette or rules guiding human beings in their private and public life. But no matter how one approaches the definition of ethics, one thing is clear and that is that it is the systematic study of the principles of good behaviour, that is, good behaviour as it applies to individuals in their interaction with other people and the environment or society. After all a well ordered society is a society that is made up of disciplined and morally upright people.
Thus what constitutes a good or bad one becomes the subject matter of ethics. The two main subdivisions of ethics are normative and metaethics, the former dealing with moral judgement and how people ought to behave while the later is the
critical analysis of the meanings of ethical terms and statement.

Ethics is also referred as ‘moral philosophy’.
It is that branch of philosophy that deals with human conduct. The moral philosopher is concerned with whether there are any value or virtues that all men ought to pursue. What is the good life for man, he may ask, and what must man do to attain it? Are values absolute, subjective, relative or culturally varied? In contemporary times, moral philosophers, especially those of the analytic tradition, concerns themselves also with issues that have to do wth the clarification of concepts – like good, bad, wrong – used in moral evaluation. They believe that it is not through this clarification of concepts that most moral issues in philosophy are
resolved. PERSPECTIVE OF ARISTOTLE
According to Aristotle as cited in (Loren), everything that we pursue or aim at is good. Some of the goods we pursue are activities (e.g singing) and some are products of activities (e.g promotion at ones place of work).
He said that some goods are pursued for the sake of their while others are pursued for the sake of something else.
Thus while every goal we pursue is good in itself, sometimes it can be pursued in a way that compromises the attainment of higher goods- making the overall pursuit bad.
There is only one good that Aristotle identified that is pursued entirely for itself and not for the sake of anything else but for its own sake. That good is eudaimonia: usually translated as happiness.
PERSPECTIVE OF IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)
Immanuel Kant is the primary advocate in history of what is called deontological ethics. Deontology is the study of duty. Kant was of the opinion that the worth of moral action is not the result of the action but the motive behind the action. His famous statement of this duty is categorical imperative. He maintained that one should act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
PERSPECTIVE OF JOHN STUART MILL
Mill defines utilitarianism as a theory based on the principle that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”