Is it more important to be a good person or to perform good acts (virtue ethics vs. action ethics)?
I believe that good works or acts are more important than being a good person. The quantifiable aspect of good acts (i.e. you would know how many someone did and like be able to measure the outcome of them) outweighs the value of being an intrinsically good person. You could be a good person and not seek human contact or interaction for decades. You could be a good person and not do anything harmful, but not do anything good for anyone either. You could be a “good person” and have a definition of “good” that registers as a very low bar for others, so would not have anything to show for that definition. In these examples, goodness doesn’t hold water where good acts would. Even if the individual doing the good acts was filled with malicious intent, if the act was genuinely good, it wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t impact the outcome, which would benefit others.
Does the process by which decisions are made matter more than the outcomes of these decisions (procedural justice vs. distributive justice)?
I absolutely do not believe that procedural justice is more important than distributive justice. In my work, there is a procedural justice process for projects and problem solving. What happens in the practice of procedural justice is that a lot of partners in the process feel valued, but the outcome is harder to obtain and, regularly, there is so much compromising on the solution that no one is truly happy with the outcome because they have had to compromise their ethics in some way. Conversely, I value distributive justice because the outcome is what is valuable. How you test that outcome would depend on the situation, but if you could neutrally evaluate the outcome and it benefitted the most individuals or elements, whatever process you used to get there would be better. Unfortunately, I think that people regularly become so enamored with their own goodness in the decision making process that they fail to see that there is a potential for the outcome to not be a good decision or have direct negative impacts.
Is my own life worth more than the lives of others, the same, or less (selfishness vs. altruism)?
It has taken me a long time to admit this, but I do believe that my life values more than the lives of others. Specifically, I believe that my life has more value than the value of some other people who fall into distinct groups like rapists and murders. That might sound logical, but I sincerely did not believe that I discriminated against anyone for any reason; in reality, I believe that people should own their decisions no matter when or where or how they committed them. So, if there were a real scenario where my life was put in immediate judgment against a rapist and the evaluation lead to one of us being killed, I would sincerely believe that I should survive and am actually entitled to live. On less absolute scales as life and death, I believe violent criminals should not have the same rights I do, so I should benefit more directly (from governing bodies and just walking down the street) than they do or ever could.