The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.
And I think the best that can be said of evolution is that it mixes moral, amoral and immoral thinking in whatever combinations it finds optimal.
> Utility has the advantage of sustaining moral care toward people far away from you
Well, in some formulations. There are well-defined and internally consistent choices of utility function that discount or redefine “personhood” in anti-humanist ways. That was more or less Rawls’ criticism of utilitarianism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics
EA being a prime example of consequentialism.
Like you’re probably not going to start with any halfway-mainstream virtue ethics text and find yourself pondering how much you’d have to be paid to donate enough to make it net-good to be a low-level worker at an extermination camp. No dude, don’t work at extermination camps, who cares how many mosquito nets you buy? Don’t do that.