Are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics three ethical systems?

On 8/18/2011 Grant Sterling sent the following message entitled, "Two and one-half Ethical Systems," to the International Stoic Forum.

Are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics three ethical
systems? I think they are not....

Let us stipulate that cons. and deont. can be collectively
summarized as ethical theories that try to answer the question
"what should I do now?" (This is a wretchedly simplified account,
but I'm hunting bigger, or at any rate different, game here so
please allow the oversimplification.) They give competing answers
to that question, so they are clearly not a single ethical theory.
Obviously, you could break each general category down into any
number of more specific versions, but let's leave that complication
out of the matter for a moment--for the purposes of this thread,
I will use Benthamism and W.D. Ross's version of intuitionism....
So let's imagine a simple case. Jones is a married man.
While having lunch one day his best friend's wife happens by.
She stops to chat with him, and then to his great surprise
she tells him that she has always been sexually attracted to
him, and that she hopes very much that he will stop by her house
the next day while her husband is out of town at a conference,
and she promises him that it will be worth his while. Coincidentally,
Jones' wife will be out of town the next day on a shopping trip with
some friends. What should Jones do now?
Bentham will say that Jones should calculate how much
pleasure he and his friend's wife are likely to have if he
has an affair with her. He must also calculate the chances of
them getting caught (presumably displeasing his wife and her
husband/his friend), although in this case the chance seems
extremely remote. Other longer-term factors must be considered
(could she get pregnant? could one of them transmit a sexual
disease to the other? will either of them want to insist on
further encounters? will it change their sex lives with their
spouses? etc.). After all these factors have been weighed, he
ought to have sex with her if the total pleasure-minus-pain for
everyone affected with be higher than the total p-p if they don't
do it. It seems that in some circumstances having sex with her
would almost certainly turn out to be the right thing to do,
but in many (probably most) other circumstances it wouldn't.
Ross would say that as a result of marrying his wife and
taking vows of faithfulness to her, Jones has a duty not to betray
her sexually. (This is a "duty of fidelity".) This is only a
_prima facie_ (that is, "ceteris paribus") duty, so it can in
principle be outweighed by other duties. It is unlikely that
any other duty would outweigh this in the imagined case (we are
not considering some bizarre science fiction case where only
by having an adulterous affair can he save the world from being
consumed by malevolent space aliens or something), so on Ross's
view Jones must not have sex with her even if it seems likely to
produce more slightly pleasure than refraining.

What about virtue ethics? As should no doubt be clear,
neither theory we have cited has mentioned Jones' character
(either his actual character, or his ideal character). Aristotle
might say that Jones should act "in the way that a person with
virtue [or, perhaps, with the virtue of temperance] would act".
Now this seems to be a third way of answering our question, and
so we seem to have a third ethical theory.
But I think this is far too fast. How, exactly, would
a virtuous person behave, on Aristotle's view? Luckily, Aristotle
tells us specifically about Jones' case: "But not every action nor every
passion admits of a mean; for some
have names that already imply badness, e.g. spite, shamelessness,
envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all
of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are
themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them. It is
not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must
always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such
things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the
right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is
to go wrong."
Sounds remarkably deontological, doesn't it? I think it
not merely sounds that way, it _is_ that way. And not just with
Aristotle, for the Stoics also talk about our duties and identify
virtuous action with (at least) the right use of impressions--and
the right use of impressions is based on truthfulness, and is
not defined in terms of virtues (but rather the reverse).
In other words, I think virtue theories ADD to obligation
theories an extra element--the idea that the ultimately correct
action must include a settled disposition of character that will
produce such actions consistently. In other words, if Jones refuses
to have sex with his best friend's wife the deontologist will say
that he has acted rightly, and the consequentialist will say that
he has acted rightly (if the circumstances are such that the p-p
value is lower for sex than for no sex), and they will stop there.
The virtue ethicist will go further and say (using Stoic language
now) "Jones' action was appropriate, but it can only be fully
virtuous if Jones has the character of the Sage [if his moral
judgment in general has been perfected]". But getting the
choice of actions correct is a necessary requirement for a virtuous
action, and the method by which we define which choices are
correct could in principle be identical to the method used by the
deontologist. (Indeed, I think they might not only be identical
in principle, I think that the two theories are a natural and
smooth fit, which is why I claim to be both a deontologist ethical
intuitionist AND a Stoic.)

So the virtue ethicist may well argue that his theory is
superior to either of the other two theories because those
theories are _incomplete_. (The Stoic virtue ethicist will have
to go farther in the case of consequentialism--insofar as cons.
identifies the good with the external consequences to be maximized,
it is fundamentally mistaken. But in theory a non-Stoic virtue
theory could be compatible with cons.) But this doesn't leave us
with three rival ethical theories on the same level--it leaves us
with two theories that offer rival accounts of how to define a
correct action but which neglect the question of character, and a third
theory that emphasizes character but offers no independent account of
how to define a correct action. That means, I think, that we have
either 2 1/2 ethical theories (two accounts of correct action, and
one theory that piggybacks an additional consideration on top of
one of the other 2), or 2 ethical theories (one complete theory,
and two half theories), or possibly 1 1/2 ethical theories (three
theories each of which only answers half the question). :)

Regards,
Grant, deontologist Stoic