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lmm comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong
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What, then, would you say is the distinction between a utilitarian and a virtue ethicist? Are they potentially just different formulations of the same idea? Are there any moral systems that definitely don't qualify as preference utilitarianism, if we allow this kind of distinction in a utility function?
Do you maybe mean the difference between utilitarianism and deontological theories? Virtue ethics is quite obviously different, because it says the business of moral theory is to evaluate character traits rather than acts.
Deontology differs from utilitarianism (and consequentialism more generally) because acts are judged independently of their consequences. An act can be immoral even if it unambiguously leads to a better state of affairs for everyone (a state of affairs where everyone's preferences are better satisfied and everyone is happier, say), or even if it has absolutely no impact on anyone's life at any time. Consequentialism doesn't allow this, even if it allows distinctions between different macroscopic histories that lead to the same macroscopic outcome.
No, deontologists are simply allowed to consider factors other than consequences.