This is actually a very insightful take on ethical theories. I hadn't thought about it but almost all of the modes of ethics I'm familiar with, even ones that aren't relevant here like Libertarianism and Utilitarianism, are reactionary. Do you know of any other modes of ethics that follow the same "internal character" structure?I think Virtue Ethics would be the real alternative. Most of this comes from one partially-remembered philosophy class, so I could be wrong, but Deontology and Consequencialism both focus on the actions an agent takes (or technically the "results" of such an action, but in this example they're the same thing), where Virtue Ethics instead focuses on the internal character of an agent.