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Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation.
This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates:
- What are roles and what is their normative import?
- To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general?
- Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine?
- How does practical reason function in relation to roles?
Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life.
List of contents
Introduction
Tim Dare and Christine Swanton
Part I: Roles and Morality
1. Characters and Roles
Glen Pettigrove
2. Roles all the Way Down
Tim Dare
3. Expertise and Virtue in Role Ethics
Christine Swanton
4. The Role of Roles in Normative Economy of a Life
Gregory Cooper
Part II: Role Ethics and Confucianism
5. Roles and Virtues: Early Confucians on Social Order and the Different Aspects of Ethics
Aaron Stalnaker
6. That's What Friends Are For: A Confucian Perspective on the Moral Significance of Friendship
Cheryl Cottine
Part III: Professional Roles
7. Crossing the Bridge
W. Bradley Wendel
8. Role Virtues, Doctor-Patience Relationships, and Virtuous Policy
Justin Oakley
Part IV: Roles and Reasons
9. Deliberative Restriction and Professional Roles
Garrett Cullity
10. Roles and Reasons
Sophie Grace Chappell
About the author
Tim Dare is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of The Counsel of Rogues? A Defence of the Standard Conception of the Lawyer’s Role (2009). He has also written on the philosophy of law and applied and professional ethics.
Christine Swanton is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche (2015), Virtue Ethics: A Pluralist View (2005), and Freedom: A Coherence Theory (1992).
Summary
Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation.
This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates:
- What are roles and what is their normative import?
- To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general?
- Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine?
- How does practical reason function in relation to roles?
Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life.
