I'm going with your last bullet point. Honestly, one of the things that makes virtue ethics so appealing to me is precisely that it doesn't give you a definitive answer for these kinds of thought experiments. Utilitarianism and deontology both claim to be complete moral theories that give you unambiguous answers for any given set of facts (at least in theory - in practice, as you note, people can easily tweak them to say one thing or the other). This approach just doesn't respect our basic intuition that there's no easy answer here, and that good people can legitimately come to different conclusions. It provides the veneer of moral clarity, but at the cost of thinking about morality in a dangerously dogmatic way. Because virtue ethics is interested in the motivations for actions rather than just the actions in themselves, it can recognize that both courses of actions could be driven by virtue (a desire to uphold the convicted criminal's rights or concern from the general public who might suffer under the opponent's policies) and both could also be driven by vice (narcissistic callousness about the consequences of one's actions or selfish desire for reelection). To be able to judge that president, then, you actually need to have a sense of what is truly motivating them.
I’m not the biggest fan of virtue ethics because I think it’s too vague, but I very much share your sentiment here. I don’t think any one overarching moral theory is likely to be correct, and so I lean towards a form of moral pluralism which accommodates parts of both consequentialism and deontology. Finding a theory which strikes the right balance between aligning with our moral intuitions and being able to challenge them when they are wrong — what Rawls called “reflective equilibrium” — is one of the central problems of ethics.
To be clear, I think it is possible for virtue ethics to make unambiguous ethical pronouncements, even on controversial topics. For example, I think Peter Singer's provocative work on global poverty, though build on a utilitarian foundation, remains equally compelling from a virtue-ethical perspective (and indeed this is the major difference between this aspect of Singer's work and some other).
I also think ethical pluralism is
itself mandated by virtue ethics. Habitually ignoring the consequences of one's actions in the name of following a rigid set of rules, or conversely, having a cavalier attitude about people's human dignity and rights in the name of the Greater Good, both strike me clearly as character flaws.
I do agree that, to be useful, virtue ethics need to be specified in a more rigorous way than I've done here (and as a matter of fact, I'm working on it!). But I think its potential has been underrated in a lot of moral philosophy.
