Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.
Especially in Scott Aaronson's phrasing where it's the SBF's gross donation spend being ahead of all of ours that we should be impressed by, not the net impact of his actions (which I find difficult to believe is positive even on pure utilitarian grounds, given that he's not exactly inspiring others to "earn to give" right now, he's shrunk the world's balance sheet and I consider some of his [notionally] philanthropic spend pretty dubious)
A true virtue-ethics take would be that SBF was inherently ennobled by good behavior or blemished by bad behavior, and the outcomes would have no relevance to this consideration. That's why I said virtue ethics is dead - approximately nobody argues like that today.
We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays no role in ethics. It may be a good in terms of outcome that a sociopathic hereditary billionaire gives away 1%< of his fortune purely for reputation laundering purposes whilst minimising his interactions with other humans he declines to fulfil his rape and torture fantasies on purely out of rational self-interest, but I don't believe that would make him a "good person" by any reasonable ethical standard, never mind a "better person than all of us". At some point intent, relative sacrifice and what would other people have done in the same position become relevant to casting judgement on his benevolence, never mind his other vices. And certainly the courts will consider intent and not just the brute fact that SBF lost a lot of people's money when deciding whether to prosecute him, convictions and sentencing; I imagine most of his defence will be structured around that...
Like it or not, we have set up our society so that economic decisionmaking power is to a large part concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population. This population is a moral fulcrum; the things they decide to do have a significant effect on actual events, in some ways even outstripping governments (which generally hold obligations on par with their power). I think an effective morality needs to acknowledge this and make special dispensation for these people if they decide to bend their power towards creating good outcomes, whether or not one approves of their existence in the abstract.
Assume you are trying to invent a morality to sell to the one percent. The pass-or-fail condition is that this morality must absolve their sins. It seems to me that the default option here is laissez-faire libertarianism, which has cultural bias against doing work to improve the worse off; in my view, being able to make inroads in this moral market is a significant victory for EA and good outcomes in general.
If you'll forgive the glibness, isn't that just deontology with extra steps? Sorry, it's just been on my mind since I learned (from Resident Contrarian article[0]) that many rule-utilitarianism is a functional reskin of disfavored deontological thinking.
[0]: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/the-weird-world-of-the-...