Virtuous Killing!

To elaborate on what I was saying in class: I want to make the bold claim that the only thing that matters morally is character. The only extent to which there is a constraint to my chopping up chuck to save five is insofar as it would be a person of bad character that would do so. In this case, I do not think a person of good character COULD chop up chuck merely to save five (if that were all there was to the case). But there are other much more ambiguous cases where I feel there is no actual constraint against killing in and of itself.
In class I used the example of pushing Wallace off of a cliff. I am not constrained in any way from doing this so long as I am acting virtuously in doing so. This may initially be a weird claim to make...but it turns out, in most cases I am not allowed to push Wallace off of the cliff, because it would be damaging to my character. (If he was my friend and had called me a bad name, it would be callous of me to shove him off the cliff). If however, in the rare case of Wallace’s being a malevolent attacker, and I act out of rational compassion to protect my friend Amy who is his next target...then I am allowed to push him off the cliff. (If it is the only way to virtuously stop him.) The key point is, I don’t see pushing Wallace off the cliff as wrong in and of itself. It is, on the whole, wrong because normally to do so one would be expressing some sort of vice. But it isn’t truly wrong until vice enters the picture.
Practical decisions of law are a good example of what drives this claim. After all, it is the act of malevolent cold blooded murder that offends the legal system most, and not merely being a causal agent in manslaughter. The presence of pain and suffering is not really what drives our moral intuitions. We are only truly offended by acts of bad character and hatred. The cause of pain alone is not enough to condemn a man as truly evil. Therefore, I claim, killing is not wrong in and of itself. (We often condone it in war, and in many other justifiable scenarios. These scenarios are justifiable, precisely because one can kill virtuously [however contradictory that might prima-facie seem to be].)
So, I think one could virtuously chop up Chuck...maybe not to save five, but if chopping him up saved a great multitude of people. Or, if Chuck was somehow responsible for the deaths his organs are going to prevent. Or, any other case one can imagine, where it would not be callous or slight minded to chop up Chuck...or where there might be a serving virtue that outweighs the vice. Just imagine any exception the deontologist wants to place outside of the constraint against doing harm. This exception is there because it is, in those cases, not a vice to cause harm.