44 What are the “take home” messages from this Part?

If one were to summarize what each of the ethical frameworks we considered have in common, it might be one simple principle: behaving ethically requires thinking about other people. In utilitarianism, that was through the costs and benefits of your actions on them. In deontology, it was thinking about others as ends, not just means. In virtue ethics, it was through considering the role of an entity in the sociality of others. In the core values model, many of those values centered on their impact on others. Finally, social contract theory required one to think about whether they were situated as others, rather than themselves. In each case, the center of the theory revolved around the active consideration of the effect one has on others. Each theory did so in a unique manner, but that each did reflects that ethics does not exist in a vacuum–we generally define it in terms of the interactions one has with others.