Role Morality

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

People occupy various roles, such as friend, lover, parent, child, student, teacher, doctor, patient, lawyer, client, researcher, and research subject. This course will explore the ways that these roles make a difference to what people are morally required or permitted to do. We will pursue this question both for its own sake, as an important part of understanding what we are morally required or permitted to do, and as an important way of diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative moral theories. At least four kinds of issue will arise. One concerns whether some roles are rightly seen provide excuses that permit some people (such as defense lawyers, interrogators, or presidents) to act in ways that would otherwise be wrong. A second concerns the obligations that special roles can add to the stock of obligations that people have. Parents seem to have special moral responsibilities to look after their children, for instance, or doctors for their patients. Can special role obligations ever bind someone who has not voluntarily assumed the role? Finally, there are many philosophical issues that arise when we start to use our tentative views about role obligations to diagnose what may have gone wrong with certain ethical theories. Here, we will be following the lead of the British philosopher W. D. Ross, who complained that utilitarians wrong-headedly attempt to boil all of moral life down to one kind of human relationship, that between a (potential) benefactor and a (potential) beneficiary. His more complex theory was aimed at recognizing that there are many other relationships (such as parent-child, promisor-promisee, and injuror-injuree) that have distinctive moral implications.