The application of utilitarianism, Kantian deontology and Aristotelian virtue ethics to the four AQA issues of stealing, simulated killing, eating animals and telling lies, comparing how each theory treats these cases and the strengths and weaknesses each application reveals.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to apply the three normative theories (utilitarianism, Kantian deontology and Aristotelian virtue ethics) to the four set issues: stealing, simulated killing (in drama, film and video games), eating animals, and telling lies. You must explain what each theory says about each issue and use these applications to evaluate the theories.

Stealing

Simulated killing

Simulated killing covers killing within drama, film and video games, where no real person is harmed.

• Utilitarianism: judges it by consequences, such as enjoyment and catharsis weighed against any tendency to desensitise or encourage real violence; the evidence about effects is what matters.
• Kant: no real person is treated merely as a means, so it is not straightforwardly forbidden, though Kant's remarks on cruelty to animals suggest indulging in simulated cruelty may corrupt one's character and respect for humanity.
• Virtue ethics: focuses on what taking pleasure in simulated killing does to character: whether it cultivates or coarsens compassion and the virtues, which can vary with the person and the context.

Eating animals

• Utilitarianism: because sentient animals can suffer, their pain counts (Bentham: "can they suffer?"); Singer argues factory farming causes vast suffering that outweighs the pleasure of eating meat, so much meat-eating is wrong.
• Kant: animals are not rational ends in themselves, so we have no direct duties to them, only indirect duties (cruelty to animals tends to harden us towards people).
• Virtue ethics: asks whether eating animals, and how they are reared, expresses virtues such as compassion and temperance or vices such as cruelty and greed.

Telling lies

What the applications reveal

• Utilitarianism is flexible and sensitive to circumstances but can license intuitively wrong acts and depends on uncertain predictions.
• Kantian ethics gives firm, principled prohibitions but can seem rigid and indifferent to disastrous consequences.
• Virtue ethics captures the role of character and judgement but can be vague about what to do in a hard case.

Using the applications to evaluate

The exam reward is not just reciting verdicts but using the four issues as test cases that expose each theory's strengths and weaknesses. Stealing is a good probe of Kant: the firm prohibition looks attractive in ordinary cases but the hard case of stealing bread to feed a starving family suggests his absolutism is too rigid, whereas utilitarianism's flexibility here looks like a strength until you notice it could also license theft that merely happens to maximise utility. Lying probes the same fault line from the other side: most people share the intuition that a protective untruth to a murderer is permissible, which counts against Kant and for both utilitarianism and virtue ethics, yet utilitarianism's licence to lie whenever it pays threatens the trust that makes communication possible, which is precisely the point Kant's universalisation test was built to capture.

Eating animals sharpens the contrast over moral status. Utilitarianism extends the moral circle to all sentient beings and so gives a clear, principled critique of factory farming, while Kant's denial of direct duties to non-rational animals strikes many as a defect of his rationalism, and virtue ethics reframes the question around the agent's character (compassion, temperance) rather than the animal's status, which some find illuminating and others find evasive. Simulated killing tests whether a theory can handle a case with no direct victim: utilitarianism must appeal to contested empirical evidence about effects, Kant must reach for indirect duties, and virtue ethics is arguably best placed because its focus on what an activity does to character does not require a victim at all. Running these comparisons is what turns description into the evaluation the longer questions reward.