Role Ethics: A Justification of the Ethical Normativity of Roles

Role ethics, which emerged from the work of Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., though with important antecedents in the East and West, presents itself as an alternative to the dominant forms of contemporary normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics. Its central claims are that roles are ethically normative, constitute the personal identities of agents, and provide us with at least some moral knowledge. In my opinion, role ethics has great potential, both as a theoretical construct and as a tool for living a morally sound life. However, some scholars, notably John Ramsay, have observed that role ethics faces a troubling objection, which its proponents have thus far failed to meet. The problem is this: attempts to explain why roles have the foundational, moral significance which role ethicists attribute to them have tended to collapse role ethics into one of its rivals, sacrificing its most important ideas whilst retaining a veneer of its role-based terminology. I argue that this is a bug, not a feature. Role ethics is no less capable than virtue ethics, consequentialism or deontology of offering a coherent, independent justification of its key normative claims. To that end, this thesis offers an account of the ethical normativity of roles within the framework of role ethics.

To begin, in Section One, comprising the first and second chapters, I lay some key pieces of groundwork, outlining the core features of role ethics, before defining the meaning of the term 'role.' My account begins with the principle, 'we are obliged to be good', so in Section Two I present my own preferred, foundationalist approach to justifying this first principle. In Section Three I develop my account, arguing that we can unfold the ethical normativity of roles from this first principle by way of Philippa Foot's concept of natural goodness. I suggest that if we accept the basic structure of her definition of moral goodness as a kind of non-defectiveness, but substitute roles for her preferred concept of 'natural kinds', the ethical normativity of roles can be justified whilst avoiding the danger of collapse. In connection with this, I argue that role ethics should be treated as non-derivative because familial and social roles are fundamental to personal identity. We cannot understand what we should do without understanding who we are, and we cannot understand that without acknowledging how roles shape our identities. Finally, in Section Four I address a few key, additional issues.

By developing an account of the ethical normativity of roles that escapes the problem of collapse, my thesis will demonstrate the value of role ethics and show that role ethics can stand as an independent alternative to the dominant forms of Western ethics.