The thing is that consequentialism and deontology are fundamentally about the moral status of actions, whereas virtue ethics is about the formal status of persons. They're not formally equivalent.
I think they can be made formally equivalent, in the sense that you can write a {consequentialist, virtue ethics, deontological} statement that corresponds to any given ethical statement in some other formalism.*
For a given virtue-ethics view, you can say "act as a virtuous person would act", or "act in a way that achieves the same consequences as a virtuous person." For example, law is full of deontological rules, but we often have to interpret those rules by asking "how a reasonable person would have judged the situation", which is essentially using an imaginary virtuous person as a guide.
I agree that different ethical theories talk in a different language and that these distinctions are relevant in practice. However, I would ignore the form of the sentences and focus on which parts of the ethical theory do the real work.
if you want to start with the person and try to derive the value of actions from that - how do you do that? You have no way of assessing the moral status of a person independently of their actions. The thing that matters about virtue ethics isn't that it talks about persons, it's that it gives a substantive specific account of what makes people good or bad, rather than giving a substantive account about goals.
You have to assess people based on their actions, but it might be that we assess actions in a way that isn't particularly consequentialist or even formalized; we can use non-ethically-relevant actions to judge people's characters. For example, if somebody seems impulsive and thoughtless, I will judge them for that, even if I don't observe their impulsivity causing them to take actions with likely bad consequences.
There's a big chunk of my brain that's optimized for evaluating how I feel about other people. When I use that part of my brain, I don't look at individual actions people take and ask about the probable consequences; rather, my overall experiences with the person and hearing about the person get tabulated together. I use that part of my brain when I form ethical judgements, and I think of philosophical ethics as a tool for training that part to work better.
* I suspect there may be some edge cases where this works badly; I am only concerned with the sort of ethical statements that tend to come up in practice.
For a given virtue-ethics view, you can say "act as a virtuous person would act", or "act in a way that achieves the same consequences as a virtuous person."
This is precisely the circularity that I was talking about. Where do you get the substance from? How do you know which person is virtuous? Unlike "act as maximises average expected utility" (some form of consequentialism) or "don't do X" (primitive deontology), "act as a virtuous person would" is an empty statement.
...For example, if somebody seems im
Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher, so this post will likely seem amateurish to the subject matter experts.
LW is big on consequentialism, utilitarianism and other quantifiable ethics one can potentially program into a computer to make it provably friendly. However, I posit that most of us intuitively use virtue ethics, and not deontology or consequentialism. In other words, when judging one's actions we intuitively value the person's motivations over the rules they follow or the consequences of said actions. We may reevaluate our judgment later, based on laws and/or actual or expected usefulness, but the initial impulse still remains, even if overridden. To quote Casimir de Montrond, "Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good" (the quote is usually misattributed to Talleyrand).
Some examples:
I am not sure how to classify religious fanaticism (or other bigotry), but it seems to require a heavy dose of virtue ethics (feeling righteous), in addition to following the (deontological) tenets of whichever belief, with some consequentialism (for the greater good) mixed in.
When I try to introspect my own moral decisions (like whether to tell the truth, or to cheat on a test, or to drive over the speed limit), I can usually find a grain of virtue ethics inside. It might be followed or overridden, sometimes habitually, but it is always there. Can you?