tl;dr - ethical rules exist for reasons, and practicing ethical behavior lets us violate the rules and remain...

tl;dr - ethical rules exist for reasons, and practicing ethical behavior lets us violate the rules and remain ethical.

Generally speaking, there are three different and incommensurate views of ethics: deontology, virtue, and utilitarianism.

There's a lot of fights about these. I've been thinking about a unified ethical theory.

First, what do these words mean?
Deontology suggests a rule-following ethic. For example "Do not kill", "Do not lie", or even "Do unto others as they would be done unto". An action is moral if it follows the rules.

Virtue suggests a state of being -- being a good person. I've interpreted this as being the best you possible -- to seek self-actualization. An action  is moral if it is the action a good person would take.

Utilitarianism suggests concern for outcomes. That the best world is the one where the best good happens. An action is moral if it creates the most good.

Here's what I think:
-- We need rules for situations that we don't know well. Having these rules helps build moral intuition.
-- The moral intuition? That stuff? That is virtue ethics. 
-- If you act in the best accordance with what you believe to be right then, pretty often, that'll result in a lot of good being done.
-- Sometimes, and this is the tricky part, we find it moral to go against a well-honed moral intuition to maximize good.

This doesn't really get us out of trolly problems. That is, there remains incommensuability. What it does do is give us a relationship. We use rules to help build a moral intuition.  When we are in novel situations -- such as trolly problems -- it is generally a good idea to follow the rules we know are generally correct.

If we have thought about and -- and this is important -- acted in a way related to ethics, then we can sometimes break the rules.

If you've thought about ethics, then you may have some good intuition that is different from standard morality about what to do in a trolly problem situation. That is, acting in ethical ways might give insight when faced with harder problems.

Much as Shakespeare can break the rules of English grammar, so too can someone like Rawls, Locke, or even Ghandi violate standard ethical rules and guildelines.

But, generally speaking, if you violate said rules., you're just rationalizing self-interest.