Comment by buntsai

I am not sure that Tolkien was a supporter of "Deontology" (ethical systems like Kant's). He was more probably a fan of virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. There is a large gulf between them. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the differences. We can not lump together into one category everyone who disagrees for many different reasons why we can sum up future consequences almost mathematically to come up with an "optimal" ethical choice. I am not sure that Tolkien is particularly interested in "greatness" either.