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The Ethics of Social Roles
 ENGAGING PHILOSOPHY
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The Ethics of Social Roles
Edited by
ALEX BARBER AND SEAN CORDELL
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 Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Contributors xi
Abstracts of Chapters xiii
1. An Overview of Social Roles and Their Ethics 1
Alex Barber and Sean Cordell

PART ONE: HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS

2. Tempted Like Achilles: Reflections on Roles and Role-Recalcitrance

in Ancient and Modern Ethics 25
Sophie Grace Chappell
3. Roles and Virtues: Which is More Important for
Confucian Women? 49
Jing Iris Hu
4. John Dewey’s Analysis of Moral Agency as Pragmatist Role Ethics 66
John Simons
5. A Good Doctor but a Bad Person? A Puzzle for Role Ethics
from Løgstrup 87
Robert Stern

PART TWO: THE NATURE AND

NORMATIVITY OF ROLES

6. All Together Now: When Is a Role Obligation Morally Binding? 107

Erin Taylor
7. The Part We Play: Social Group Membership as a Role 133
Tracy Isaacs
8. Explaining Role-Based Reasons 156
Reid Blackman
vi 

PART THREE: ROLES, INSTITUTIONS,

AND ORGANIZATIONS

9. Role Ethics and Institutional Functions 177

Sean Cordell
10. Role Obligations to Alter Role Obligations 200
Stephanie Collins
11. Are Obligations of Friendship Role Obligations? 217
Diane Jeske
12. My Job and Its Requirements 236
Thomas H. Smith

PART FOUR: WELLBEING, SELFHOOD,

AND ROLES

13. Three Relations Between Roles and the Good 263

Samuel Clark
14. Participatory Wellbeing and Roles 278
Alex Barber
15. Virtuous Chameleons: Social Roles, Integrity, and the Value of
Compartmentalization 298
Luke Brunning

Index 321
 Preface

Many of the most significant practical deliberations we make turn on some social
role or other we happen to occupy at the time (where ‘social role’ is read widely to
include professional roles such as teacher or manager as well as parent, carer,
friend, citizen, etc.). Members of the emergency services often put themselves in
harm’s way, running towards a danger zone instead of away from it like everyone
else. They are admired for doing so, but at the same time this is something they, as
firefighters or police officers, are meant to be doing. Morally loaded decision
making often requires us to reason and act with a particular hat on, so to speak.
Sometimes we must first decide which hat to wear (of colleague, of friend, of
manager) or whether to wear a hat at all.
Despite these being features of daily experience, the ethical significance of role
occupancy has long gone under-acknowledged as a topic within normative ethics.
To be more accurate, while certain social roles (including legal, medical, business,
military, gender, family, and friendship roles) have been recognized as ethically
significant, their significance has been addressed piecemeal. We currently lack a
developed literature on the ethical significance of social roles as such—on what
they are, on why they appear to have ethical force, on the structure of that force,
and on the significance of social roles for identity and wellbeing.
The contributors to this volume have set out to fix this, building on the small
body of work that does already exist and extending it into new and unexpected
areas, bringing out the diversity of ethical questions that arise for social roles. The
topic, it turns out, is important for the ethics of various individual social roles, but
also for an integrated understanding of a suite of other live topics such as collective
agency, impartiality, special relationships, wellbeing and self, and social justice.
Our hope for the volume is that it advances the ethics of social roles as a subfield of
ethics, at the interface of these other literatures but also deserving of attention in
its own right. This will help the English-speaking philosophical world out of a
temporary parochialism, since, as several of the contributors help to bring out, this
relative neglect of the ethics of roles is something of a historical blip.
 Acknowledgements

Our work on this volume was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, which funded the Role Ethics Network between 2015 and 2018
(Project ref: AH/N006321/1), allowing members to meet and discuss work in
progress at four workshops and a conference. This same grant, plus The Open
University Arts Faculty, supported Codes of Ethics workshops involving non-
academic professionals in 2018 and 2019, and through these we learned how some
of the issues dealt with in this volume play out in different professional spheres.
We are grateful to all the many participants at these events, as we are to those at
a MANCEPT workshop at the University of Manchester in 2013. We are espe-
cially thankful, of course, to the authors of this collection for their contributions.
They, and the OUP editor Peter Momtchiloff, were both patient and responsive
during its long gestation. Three reviewers for OUP also provided helpful steers at a
critical point.
 List of Contributors

Alex Barber is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Open University.

Reid Blackman is CEO of Virtue, and was a Fellow at the Parr Center for Ethics, University
of North Carolina, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University.
Luke Brunning is Lecturer in Applied and Inter-Disciplinary Ethics at the University of
Leeds.

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University.

Samuel Clark is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University.
Stephanie Collins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University.

Sean Cordell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Open University.

Jing Iris Hu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.
Tracy Isaacs is Professor of Philosophy at Western University, Ontario.

Diane Jeske is Professor of Philosophy at University of Iowa.

John Simons is an independent scholar who gained his PhD from the London School of
Economics.
Thomas H. Smith is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester.
Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield.

Erin Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Washington and Lee University.

 Abstracts of Chapters

1. An Overview of Social Roles and Their Ethics

This introductory chapter offers a basic framework for thinking about the topic of
social roles and their ethics, and in doing so addresses latent resistance to the very
idea that the norms associated with social roles have an ethical claim on us. It
suggests a working understanding of what social roles are, a default terminology, a
set of key questions, a description of links to neighbouring debates, an overview of
the other chapters in the volume, and finally a list of key works on a wrongly
neglected topic.

2. Tempted Like Achilles: Reflections on Roles and

Role-Recalcitrance in Ancient and Modern Ethics

This chapter considers the notions of role-compliance and role-recalcitrance by

starting from a simple argument-schema for role-reasons: (1) that role-
recalcitrance is a human universal; (2) that at least some role-recalcitrance is
ethically interesting; (3) that at least some ethically interesting role-recalcitrance is
a very good thing. The argument for (1) and (2) examines some well-known
claims that Alasdair MacIntyre offers about “heroic societies” in After Virtue: in
particular, his connected claims (a) that people in those societies cannot “step
back” from their roles, and (b) that there are arguments across the Is‒Ought Gap
that are based on “functional concepts”. A re-examination of the Iliad’s central
figure of Achilles refutes (a) and suggests an a fortiori argument for (1). Analysis
of (b) leads to a distinction—which refutes (b)—between logical and psycho-
logical/sociological cogency; to some reflections on analyticity in general; and to
the conclusion, which is a rephrasing of (3), that at least sometimes the ability to
be role-recalcitrant is precisely “what makes us truly human”.

3. Roles and Virtues: Which is More Important

for Confucian Women?

Some influential scholars in Confucian philosophy argue that roles rather than
virtues are at the centre of Confucian ethics. The advocates of this Confucian Role
xiv   

Ethics maintain that roles are not only important for providing ethical guidance
for those who fulfil them; roles also constitute the Confucian moral agent. This
chapter defends a controversial claim—roles do not constitute moral agency for
Confucian women, and nor can they offer sufficient moral guidance; instead,
they are supplemented by virtues. The argument for this claim recognizes that,
historically, Confucian women, unlike men, experienced—and were educated to
expect—a drastic change of roles and social relationships when leaving their
maternal family and moving in with their husbands and in-laws. These changes
prepared Confucian women to embrace a view of moral agency through which they
learn to focus on virtues as a more reliable source of moral guidance than roles.

4. John Dewey’s Analysis of Moral Agency as

Pragmatist Role Ethics

This chapter renders the analysis of moral agency by John Dewey, one of the
founders of American pragmatism, as an account of pragmatist role ethics. For
Dewey, moral obligations arise naturally in, and are constitutive of, the role
relationships that are necessary to a society’s existence. The purpose of morality
is regulation of the mutual reciprocal expectations that people have of one
another’s conduct in their enactment of social roles. Dewey insists that acts with
moral significance are enactments of the self. Thus, when making morally signifi-
cant choices of role and performance, the agent is choosing the sort of person she
is or wants to become. Deliberation over the choice is influenced by three
independent sources of normativity, which often diverge in influence: the
agent’s own judgement of the moral praiseworthiness of the choice; its socially
recognized obligations; and whether the character trait it reveals will be approved
by others.

5. A Good Doctor but a Bad Person? A Puzzle for

Role Ethics from Løgstrup

This chapter considers the following challenge to social role ethics:

1. Role ethics holds (a) that you can be a good occupant of a role by fulfilling
the obligations associated with the role, and (b) that this is sufficient to make
you a good person (at least to some degree) provided that the institution
itself is a good one
2. But a person can count as having fulfilled their role obligations while being a
moral monster
3. So role ethics is not an ethics.
    xv

The chapter shows how this challenge is suggested by what K. E. Løgstrup says
about social norms and roles, but also how he might provide resources with which
to meet it, thereby offering a way for the role ethicist to escape the problem
outlined above. Finally, the wider implications of Løgstrup’s view for some of the
standard issues in role ethics are discussed.

6. All Together Now: When Is a Role Obligation

Morally Binding?

This chapter defends a novel account of the connection between social roles and
their associated demands. Consider pairs of statements such as: (a) ‘Maura is
Ethan’s mother’ and (b) ‘Maura has an obligation to provide for Ethan.’ It is
natural to think that such pairs of sentences don’t merely state two unconnected
truths about the agents involved. Rather, in each case, the truth of (b) seems to be
in some sense explained by the truth of (a). Competing theories of the moral status
of social roles, and their associated obligations, aim to explicate the nature and
significance of this explanatory connection. The present chapter does this by
arguing that many of the obligations or norms that attach to social roles morally
bind us by default. These norms are morally binding since, first, they are ultim-
ately explicable in terms of conventional moral duties and, secondly, those
conventional duties enjoy a default but defeasible good standing.

7. The Part We Play: Social Group Membership as a Role

This chapter explores the nature of social group membership understood as a role.
We use social group categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, etc., to identify
social groups to which individuals belong. Roles are parts that people play within a
given collective context. The context also defines the roles. Roles’ occupants have
powers, obligations, and responsibilities qua role occupant. This chapter’s central
question is: does considering social group membership as roles enable us to deepen
our ethical understanding of oppressive social and political contexts and of what is
morally required of us when we are living in such contexts? The chapter argues that
a role analysis of social group membership in oppressive social contexts can help
people living within them to gain a more determinate understanding of their
obligations with respect to the collective goal of eradicating injustice.

8. Explaining Role-Based Reasons

Occupants of social roles have normative reasons that non-occupants lack. How
do we explain this? Answering the question hinges on issues both in social
xvi   

ontology concerning the nature of social roles and in metaethics concerning the
existence conditions for normative reasons. This chapter begins by laying out the
conceptual terrain before sketching what is here called a ‘non-normative’ account
of roles in social ontology: a view that rejects the normative account which takes
roles to be identical to a set of normative relations. The chapter then articulates
and defends a novel account of role-based reasons, Role Pluralism. According to
Role Pluralism, role-based normative reasons are externalist (i.e. they do not
depend on the motivational constitution of role occupants) and non-hierarchical
(i.e. the reason-giving power of a role does not depend on any other role or
anything external to a role for that power). Finally, the chapter explains why the
most common objection to this view—that immoral roles cannot provide norma-
tive reasons—is irrelevant.

9. Role Ethics and Institutional Functions

This chapter begins by setting out the problem of role-indeterminacy raised in

Michael Hardimon’s ‘Role Obligations’. It then considers the prospects for a solution
in terms of a functional account of institutions which determine those roles. After
giving some instances of the role-indeterminacy problem and focusing on the case of
role-requirements being mis-specified by institutions (‘ersatz obligations’), three
ways in which a functional view might be formulated in response to this problem
are discussed. First, a backward-looking etiological approach (roughly, what some
institution is ‘there for’ in the first place); secondly a present-focused ‘practical’ view
(roughly, what it is ‘used for’); and thirdly a forward-looking teleological account in
terms of institutional ends (roughly, what it is ‘good for’). After running through the
attractions and shortcomings of these accounts, an alternative view is defended as
more coherent. Using language borrowed from Aristotle, this alternative treats
institutions as having an ergon, a ‘characteristic activity’.

10. Role Obligations to Alter Role Obligations

Many roles are situated within organizations. The occupants of these roles often
confront a dilemma between (i) the occupancy conditions, performance condi-
tions, and functions of the role, as bestowed upon the role by the organization’s
decision-making procedures, and (ii) the occupancy conditions, performance
conditions, and function that the role should ideally have. This chapter argues
that this dilemma should be resolved in favour of (ii). Yet this does not require
forgoing role-based considerations in favour of extra-role considerations. Instead,
we should conceptualize organizationally specified roles as being one token of
an underlying role-type. The underlying role-type provides the organizational
    xvii

role-token with its fundamental occupancy conditions, performance conditions,

and function. When the token is a poor instance of its type, organizational role-
occupants have obligations—grounded in the fundamental aspects of the role—to
challenge this. These are role obligations that call upon one to alter one’s role
obligations.

11. Are Obligations of Friendship Role Obligations?

Are the obligations of friendship role obligations? This chapter argues that the ways
in which ‘friend’ differs from paradigmatic social roles such as ‘spouse’ or ‘daughter’
are more significant than the ways in which it is similar to them, and, thus, we ought
not to understand being a friend as a social role nor ought we to understand the
obligations of friendship as role obligations. In fact, to conceive of ‘friend’ as a social
role would be to diminish the ways in which friendship adds value to our lives and
binds us to certain other people. The significance of friendship is in part a matter of
how it is constructed by the parties involved and provides a space for understanding
oneself in relation to another independent of everyone else and, very importantly,
apart from societal expectations and norms.

12. My Job and Its Requirements

This chapter concerns the ethics and metaphysics of occupations, such as teacher,
waiter, and priest. It argues that teacher is a functional kind, but teachers are not
functional objects. If you are a practising teacher, it is likely that you perform a
function and serve a purpose, that of imparting knowledge and cultivating minds
and skills. This is what teachers, generically, are for, and it is what your school is
for. But it is not what you are for. Easily confused senses of ‘job’ are distinguished:
occupation, position, requirement, and function. The chapter explains that the
requirements of your position and occupation do not entail ability, reasons, or
fault (if not complied with), and that if you are not as your position and
occupation require, you are not as you ought to be, but it does not follow that
there is anything wrong with you. The chapter includes some metaphysical
speculation about positions, and examines some sources of, and remedies for,
workplace alienation and anxiety.

13. Three Relations Between Roles and the Good

What is the relation between roles and the human good? Between our construc-
tion, maintenance, and enaction of institutions, and the life which goes well for the
xviii   

person whose life it is? This chapter reads selected martial autobiographies to
explore three relations and what they mean for the nature of the good:

1. Tools for self-shaping: roles are social technology for shaping ourselves
towards good understood as fulfilment of desires which are independent
of those roles.
2. Good-making practices: roles are parts of good-making practices which
transform individuals by creating goods and initiating individuals into them.
3. Self-discovery: roles are a method for gaining self-knowledge. They help
each of us discover her unchosen, seedlike, initially opaque self, and thereby
discover her particular good, which is that self ’s realization.

The chapter concludes that some roles’ relation to the good is that they test and
reveal the self and therefore its good.

14. Participatory Wellbeing and Roles

The wellbeing that can accrue to individuals through their participation in

collective endeavours, here called their participatory wellbeing, is a fundamental
component of human wellbeing more broadly. It is also difficult to conceptualize,
let alone quantify, and has been neglected in philosophy, apparently falling into a
gap between the literature on collective agency and the literature on wellbeing. As
a contribution towards filling in that gap, this chapter uses the notion of a role
within a group—encompassing anything from familial and professional roles to
being a friend or a citizen—to solve a puzzle about participatory wellbeing. The
puzzle, crudely stated, is that while wellbeing is an essentially individualistic
notion, participation is essentially social. By conceiving of participation as a
matter of occupying and performing a role, we can recognize and model the
complexity (i.e. the multifaceted nature) of participatory wellbeing.

15. Virtuous Chameleons: Social Roles, Integrity, and

the Value of Compartmentalization

Most people occupy several social roles. How are these roles to be managed? This
chapter examines one strategy: the compartmentalization of roles, in which
actions and mindsets change with the roles people occupy. People might worry,
however, that compartmentalization is in tension with integrity or one’s commit-
ment to the good. Might an integrating approach to roles be better? This chapter
argues that compartmentalization is a fine way to manage multiple social roles.
Central to the argument is a response to those who think compartmentalization
    xix

must inhibit practical reflection, or is in tension with having integrity, or is

alienating. In fact, the task of compartmentalizing roles is itself a valuable practical
activity. Maintaining clear boundaries between roles and their attendant mindsets
enables us to be guided by fully specified virtues, and flexible boundary work
can help us avoid inappropriate forms of immersion in roles at the expense of
other people.
 1
An Overview of Social Roles
and Their Ethics
Alex Barber and Sean Cordell

1. Introduction

A recent sociology article asks what that discipline could possibly have been like
before the notion of a social role became as fundamental to it as it is today (Jacobs
2018). In philosophical ethics the situation is almost the reverse, at least in the
English-language tradition. There was a time when the importance of social roles
to ethical deliberation was widely acknowledged and discussed, most memorably
in F. H. Bradley’s ‘My Station and Its Duties’, but that discourse fell dormant
during the twentieth century (Bradley 1927 [1876]; Stern 2013). Exceptions to the
silence (e.g. Cohen 1966; Emmet 1966; Downie 1971) were rare and largely
overlooked, or else were confined to examining particular roles in isolation, with
no accompanying generalization into an ethical theory of social roles as such (e.g.
Firestone 1970; Walzer 2006 [1977]). This trajectory could be tied to the rise, in
political philosophy and in society at large, of liberal individualism, Rawlsian or
otherwise.¹ But whatever the cause, appeals today to the obligations of social roles,
or of Bradley’s ‘stations’, make many uneasy. They bring to mind threats to the
autonomy and equality of all those who would refuse to know their place.
And yet social roles, as present-day sociologists (at least) are perfectly aware,
are unavoidable in practice, and for good reason. They allow us to manage our
coexistence and to act collectively. A moment’s reflection is enough to show that
getting rid of them entirely or pretending they don’t exist is neither attractive nor
feasible as a response to the restrictive or oppressive character of some of them.
A person who insists they shouldn’t have to abide by role norms is, after a certain
point, going to sound like a driver who insists they shouldn’t have to slow down
for corners. And as with driving, roles have an ethical character, which is where
philosophy comes in. Classic sociological discussions of roles (e.g. Linton 1936;

¹ Rawls himself typically subsumes discussion of social roles within his broader framework, as for
example when considering the position of ‘certain representative individuals’ when applying the
principles of justice to the basic structure of society, where this must be from a ‘suitably general
point of view’ (Rawls 2000 [1971], 81–82).

Alex Barber and Sean Cordell, An Overview of Social Roles and Their Ethics In: The Ethics of Social Roles.
Edited by: Alex Barber and Sean Cordell, Oxford University Press. © Alex Barber and Sean Cordell 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843562.003.0001
2   

Goffman 1990; Dahrendorf 1968; Hilbert 1981) have been geared primarily
towards a social-scientific understanding of roles, and so can inform but not settle
normative questions about roles. And in case there is any doubt that role occu-
pancy can be morally charged, here are just three commonplace ways in which
social roles have ethical salience.

Special obligations
Firefighters and lifeguards discharge role obligations when they carry out life-
endangering acts of rescue, acts that for passers-by or sunbathers would be morally
supererogatory or reckless. Less urgently but just as clearly, an admissions tutor has
a duty to tell an ambitious undergraduate student that he is ill-equipped for
doctoral study, assuming this is true. For someone outside that role to impart
that same truth to the same student in the same words and in the same manner
could be morally questionable, perhaps even cruel.
Wearing many hats
We all have to juggle the different roles we occupy, whether it be professional,
familial, citizenship, or friendship roles. Sometimes these create conflict, as when
a colleague who is also a friend starts underperforming in one or other of these
roles. Roles provide us with normative levers and pulleys in our everyday
practical reasoning, and when the mechanisms get jammed or clash, it is only
by thinking about what we should do as friend, as colleague, as friend-and-
colleague, that we can negotiate our way towards right action.
Fulfilling roles
Roles, and our performance of them, can influence the fuller story of an individ-
ual’s life as well as its episodes. Cases of life-changing career paths or vocations
abound. Maybe there really are, for example, some social workers, schoolteachers,
or carers whose ‘egoism has disappeared unobtrusively into the care and service of
others’ (Murdoch 1992, 429). Or maybe not, but undoubtedly these and other roles
(e.g. parent as a ‘transformative’ role, Paul 2015) can impact in differing degrees on
their occupants’ development as persons.

On the face of it, then, social roles have an ineliminable impact on the moral status
of certain actions and perhaps even on the assessment of moral character
(Pettigrove 2020).
In the sociology article mentioned earlier, Struan Jacobs identifies personality as
the notion displaced by role within that discipline. His suggestion is noteworthy in
the present context because a pervasive, latent, animosity to social roles within
normative ethics often turns on the contrast between social roles and the persons
who take them on. Most of us will at some point have felt a conflict between the
‘me’ who is required to face and interact with the world in some role-prescribed
and perhaps stereotype-prone way, and the ‘real me’ who wants to shake off those
         3

shackles. This urge is at its strongest when the role is a bad fit for ‘the person we
truly are’, as we might put it. It is striking, then, that the modern word person
derives from the Latin word persona, meaning mask. The masks in question were
worn on stage, so a derivative usage emerged, naturally enough, and it came to
mean persona on or off stage. Centuries later we have somehow ended up with
the word ‘person’ coming to mean the individual behind the mask rather than
the mask itself. The word has flipped, in other words, which is why we now
use ‘person’ to mean the individual occupying the role, distinguishable from the
role itself.
The other word in this binary opposition, role, also has a noteworthy history. It
appears to have the same root as roll in the sense of register or ‘roll call’, both
deriving from the practice of keeping a list of those entitled to practise a profession
on a roll of parchment (OED, roll, n.1, I.2.b). The idiom ‘struck off the rolls’ is a
hangover from these origins. But the word soon spawned derivative senses. It
began to be used to describe characters on stage, for example, and to be used to
describe an individual’s contribution to a one-off act, as opposed to a role that is
relatively stable through time. Thus, on a hike, we might now speak of its being so-
and-so’s role to shut the gate since they were the last person through it. A third
expansion of meaning is that it can now be used of social roles that aren’t normally
subject to control through a register, such as the role of friend or sister.
So much for English etymology. In the end, how we use these and other words
in philosophy is up for grabs. Nonetheless this short semantic history lesson does
carry us quickly to the very heart of the philosophy of social roles. That is, every
one of the ethical questions addressed by contributors to this volume turns in one
way or another on the relation between these two abstract notions, that of an
individual person and that of a social role—an occupier and a thing they can
occupy, so to speak. This alone makes the topic a rich seam for philosophers to
mine. In the rest of this chapter we offer an overview of the topic. This is to some
extent a constructive or imaginative act since, as we have been emphasizing, there
has been a latent disregard for the ethics of social roles as a unified topic in
modern philosophy. That said, we do not wish to pretend there has been no prior
work in this area to survey. We and other contributors are building on the
steady trickle of publications that began to appear in the late twentieth century.
This includes work on the moral dimensions of professional roles (Freedman
1978) and social roles more generally (Andre 1991), most notably Michael
O. Hardimon’s influential paper ‘Role Obligations’ (1994). Samuel Applbaum
(1999), for example, offers a systematic critique of the view that professional
public roles can justify what would, outside those roles, be morally prohibited.
There has also been growth in a virtue-theoretic perspective on the ethics of roles
(Cordell 2011, Swanton 2016), and on particular professional roles (Solomon 1997;
Van Hooft 1999; Oakley and Cocking 2001; Solum 2003; Hursthouse 2007;
Swanton 2007), including more recently a special journal issue on the topic
4   

(Hamilton 2016), and a collection of essays (Dare and Swanton 2020) which
expands that topic into novel territory such as the relation between roles and
reasons. Much of this work has been written in isolation from the rest or has
focused on specific questions within the broader topic of roles and their ethics.
With this in mind, our citations throughout this introductory chapter constitute a
kind of proto-literature for a field we regard as still nascent.
In Section 2 we address the obvious starting question of what social roles are,
attempt to identify their most salient properties, and offer a neutral platform—
including a default terminological toolkit—from which to think about their ethics.
Section 3 surveys the range of key ethical questions one might ask about social
roles, without taking a stand on any of them. Section 4 highlights important links
to neighbouring literatures. We end, in Section 5, with an overview of the four
sections into which contributions to the present volume have been organized.

2. What is a Social Role? Occupancy, Performance, Function

Each contributor to this volume rightly presupposes some particular understand-

ing or definition of social role, from which they go on to argue for a particular
substantial claim. Here, we explore the question of what social roles are, less with
an eye on advancing a particular thesis and more as a way of giving the volume’s
readers a default way of talking and reasoning about social roles. These same
readers are encouraged to diverge from this default as they see fit, just as other
authors already do.
The simplest way to capture the intended meaning of a phrase is often to point
at paradigm cases. ‘Social role’ as it figures in the title of this collection is no
exception. As we understand the term, spouse, doctor, friend, colleague, parent,
and public intellectual are all social roles. But as with any definition-by-list, this
leaves us wanting more. What makes these examples instances of the kind? That is
what we really want to know as we attempt to get to grips with the nature of social
roles and their ethics. It is also what we need if we want our definition to tell us
how to categorize novel or controversial cases, such as ‘influencer’, or ‘being Black’
(Fanon 2008 [1952]; Mills 1997; Kisolo-Ssonko 2019), or to explain apparently
similar but contrasting cases such as lorry driver (a social role in that it is a job) as
opposed to car driver (arguably just something one does, not a social role). And
finally, it is what we need if we are to establish whether there is even a useful,
univocal notion underpinning our group of paradigm cases. Hardimon, for
example, distinguishes non-contractual roles—such as citizen and familial
roles—from contractual ones such as professional and occupational roles. He
then includes both contractual and non-contractual roles within a stipulated
category of institutional social roles from which he excludes ‘friend’, since it is
non-institutional (1994, 335–336). Such distinctions are best thought of, we
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suggest, as distinctions between different ethical sub-categories of social role

rather than between things that are genuine social roles and things that are not.²
In what follows, we offer what is intended to be a relatively neutral ontology of
social roles. It is neutral (or so we suppose) in two senses. First, and as already stated,
it is designed to supply a rough and ready framework for readers new to the topic,
and not meant to settle substantial questions. But the account is neutral in a
further sense: it spans across a very broad range of social roles, rather than homing
in on one type in particular. And here it is worth pausing to notice just how many
dimensions of variation there are here, all potentially ethically significant. We have
just mentioned the contractual vs non-contractual contrast. To this we can add:

Voluntary vs involuntary (e.g. adoptive parent vs conscript)

Open to all vs by invitation only (e.g. consumer vs godparent)
Institutionally embedded vs free-floating (e.g. Deputy Dean vs friend)
Highly codified vs loosely specified (e.g. commanding officer vs parent)
Socially endorsed vs contested or extinguished (e.g. teacher vs slave-owner)
Biologically specified vs socially laden (e.g. sibling vs ‘Mum’)
Short-term vs enduring (e.g. juror vs hereditary monarch)
Broad in brief vs narrow in brief (e.g. public intellectual vs expert witness)
Decision making vs decision facilitating (e.g. patient vs surgeon)

Despite this variety, we suggest, all social roles have three core features: they are
occupied, they are performed, and they ostensibly have a social function of some
kind. We can travel a long way towards a default understanding of social roles and
their ethics by thinking about each feature in turn.

Occupancy

Social roles have this first core feature in common with dramatic roles. Both can,
in principle anyway, be occupied by different people. We can take on and let go of
social roles, just as actors can take on and leave parts in a play. Shakespeare’s
character Jaques in As You Like It spots the parallel:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

² Hardimon himself would quite possibly accept as much, since his restriction of the term to
institutional roles is motivated simply by a desire to say how he plans to use the term in a paper
focused only on roles of that type.
6   

Some social roles are more freely entered or left than others, it is true, while others
do not survive the departure of a particular occupant, but all social roles seem in
principle to have what we can call occupancy conditions, norms that specify when
one is to count as a legitimate occupant of the role.
Taking our cue from Shakespeare’s Jaques, we break occupancy conditions
down into entrance conditions and exit conditions. The usual entrance condition
for the role of monarch, for example, is that one be the eldest son, or else the eldest
child, of the most recently deceased occupant of that same role. Its usual exit
condition is death, a kind of limiting case in which one leaves the role by leaving
the world though the role itself persists. Occupancy conditions are not always so
readily stated. It is not easy to specify what counts as no longer being a person’s
friend, for example, as we learn in the schoolyard. Such vagueness is nonetheless
compatible with the role of friend being something one can enter and leave. The
entrance and exit conditions for the monarch role, for that matter, are not as
straightforward as was just implied. Usurpers have been bypassing primogeniture
throughout history, and abdicators have sought to escape the role while still alive.
It is unclear whether these scenarios constitute violations of the occupancy
conditions or are instead an aspect of the occupancy conditions (on the grounds
that showing willingness and having the power to hold onto the crown are a sign
of being qualified). As soon as one scratches the surface one finds important
distinctions: for example, between what the occupancy conditions are said to be
and what they are in practice, or between what they are (officially or in practice)
and what they should be.
To specify a social role’s entrance and exit conditions—capturing or resolving
such vagueness and ambiguity—is part of what it is to specify that social role.
These occupancy conditions will differ vastly from role to role, of course, often in
ethically salient ways. Voluntariness is a key variable here. In a liberal society the
norm is to avoid coercive social roles wherever possible, since levering people
unwillingly into social roles has been a way of denying their freedom throughout
history. Even now, though, pure voluntariness, where it is entirely up to the
individual whether and when they can take on or shed the role, is relatively
rare. Contractual employment usually requires some notice, on pain of penalty;
and to abandon a friendship simply because it suits you—because your friend has
been struggling recently and it is getting bothersome—may well be to violate a
norm of friendship. For other roles, such as the role of child or sibling, the non-
voluntary aspect is more obvious: you don’t get to choose your parents, and
insofar as there are filial obligations they are handed to one at birth. A parent,
likewise, may be thought of as locked into their role by default, long after they
entered the role voluntarily or otherwise (though there is room for disagreement
here; compare Jeske 1998 and Porter 2014). But what does being ‘locked in’ in this
way entail? More generally, what follows from occupancy? For this we must turn
to our second core feature.
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Performance

The analogy between social roles and acting is useful here, too. Just as social and
dramatic roles are both things one can move into and out of, so too they are things
the occupant is expected to perform. Getting the part is one thing, playing it
something else. In the case of social roles, we must look to what we call its
performance conditions, norms that attach to someone by virtue of their occupying
that role. The most obvious examples of performance conditions are things a person
has responsibility for doing by virtue of being the occupant. A parent, by virtue of
being a parent, is obliged to safeguard the interests of the relevant child or children.
To fail to do this is, in extremis, to have failed not simply as a parent but as a moral
agent. But alongside these duties, these role obligations as they are generally called,
performance conditions typically include a range of powers, what we will call role
entitlements. The acting analogy will run out of steam eventually but it is still helpful
to illustrate the point. An actor in the role of Richard II is obliged to deliver the lines,
of course, but they are also entitled to have sufficient time in which to study and
learn the part, a space in which to rehearse, a stage from which to deliver the lines,
an audience to deliver them too, alongside other actors, with guidance from a
director, and perhaps some financial recompense to make all of this feasible for
them as human beings with other pressures on them outside the role. Likewise for
an occupant of the role of police officer, who has both role obligations (primarily to
maintain the peace and uphold the law, with other obligations flowing from that)
and certain powers that come with the role. These latter include the power of arrest,
for example, which is importantly different in scope from, say, citizen’s arrest.
Because the power of arrest and the associated obligations come with the role, a
police officer loses these as soon as she exits the role. ‘Come with’ is an under-
statement: that power and those obligations are partially constitutive of the role,
and to specify a set of performance conditions is, as with specifying a set of
occupancy conditions, part of what it is to specify the role. We find some of the
same looseness, the same ambiguity and vagueness, with performance conditions
as we did with occupancy conditions. Even with roles for which the duties are
tightly specified, by a professional code of conduct for example, the adequacy of
that specification is itself open to challenge. Still, all roles, excepting those with a
purely honorary function, seem to come attached with some or other performance
conditions. And sometimes the vagueness is only there if you set out to find it.
Famously, there is ‘no single right way to parent’, but this is misleading. To parent
requires one to act in accordance with the primary responsibility one has for the
wellbeing of the child. The ‘no single right way’ mantra is correct insofar as there is
more than one way to exercise that primary responsibility, but that is true of every
role and does not necessarily amount to imprecision, any more than there being
more than one way to commit murder stands in the way of that notion’s having a
tidy definition.
8   

Verbal slippage of a different kind can sometimes blur the distinction between
performance and occupancy conditions. We can use the word ‘parent’ to refer
both to what someone is and to what they do, for example, which is why an
assertion of the sentence ‘My dad wasn’t a dad’ would make sense. Sometimes the
blurring of the distinction goes beyond simple messiness of language, since failure
to perform well can itself be the trigger for counting as having left the role—a tacit
exit condition. Failure to fulfil the usual obligations of friendship, perhaps, is to
have ceased to be a friend, just as a sentry who leaves their post is no longer a
sentry except perhaps in name. (This is not always the case: a teacher between jobs
is still in some sense a teacher.) Neither species of blurring—the slipperiness of
ordinary language or the use of performance as an indicator of occupancy—shows
that we should jettison the distinction between what counts as being in the role
and what counts as performing the role.

Function

Taken together, the occupancy (entrance and exit) conditions and performance
(obligation and entitlement) conditions of a role specify what the role is. We
might suppose that in a well-designed role, its entitlements will cohere with its
obligations, and both should cohere with the occupancy conditions. The entitle-
ments should enable a suitable occupant to carry out the associated duties
effectively (otherwise we get ‘all responsibility and no power’) but should not be
excessive (otherwise we get ‘all power and no responsibility’); there should be
suitable occupants (the entrance conditions should not be too stringent and the
exit conditions not be too liberal) but not too many occupants (with everyone in a
business occupying a leadership role, for example). Society’s roles are defective to
the extent that its various conditions fail to coalesce into realistic vehicles for
individuals to contribute to and benefit from that society.
The word ‘defective’ is warranted only because of the third core feature of roles:
that they have some function, some purpose. Or rather, they ostensibly have a
function, some purported benign or positive purpose in society or within an
organization. One purported function of the role of entrepreneur, for example,
is to generate wealth, and not only for the occupant of the role. This is what the
role is ‘for’, or should be for. If a social role turns out to lack the purpose it was
advertized as having—if entrepreneurs just use their vast wealth for whimsical
projects and no one else benefits, for example—this doesn’t mean it is not a social
role after all, it just means it is open to criticism from that angle. By contrast, it jars
to describe being a thief as a social role, because it normally lacks even a purported
social function, Hollywood and Robin Hood mythology aside.
To talk of the criticizability of roles—because they lack an ethical or other
function or have poorly balanced occupancy and/or performance conditions—is
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to bring us close to their ethical character. Since we aim to remain neutral on

substantial questions, we will not here attempt to be more specific on these
matters. Still, if only to illustrate how the framework we have presented can be
used to discuss ethical and socio-political topics in this area, consider the following
‘function first’ approach to the optimal design of roles. This approach says that,
when thinking about what makes for a good role, one must always begin by
clarifying what benign outcome its effective performance would bring about. This
can be used to inform us what its role obligations should be—they will be the
things that need to be done by the occupant if said benign outcome is to come
about. The function of the role of fire-fighter, for example, is tied in a very obvious
way to what someone in that role is obliged to do, with both obligation and
function on display in the name. A set of obligations that does not guarantee this is
hence criticizable. And from the role obligations we can infer a certain set of role
entitlements, a set of conditions that make it de facto feasible for an occupant to
perform the duties of the role and hence yield the assumed social good (safety
equipment, right of access to mains water, and so on). This function-first
approach appears more sophisticated than old-fashioned talk of ‘stations’, where
static and unchallengeable authority structures were somehow given. But like that
old-fashioned talk, and perhaps too like the functionalist perspective on roles
associated with the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1937; see also Merton 1968), it can
be criticized on the grounds that, in putting the function of roles first, it puts the
humanity of their occupants last.

Other Properties of Roles

‘Core’ does not mean ‘necessary and sufficient’, and these three core traits of roles
are not meant to be definitional, if only because some things have them but are not
social roles. Promiser and promisee, for example, are roles but not social roles.
Exactly what makes a role a social role is not something we try to settle here. Many
authors, us included, often omit ‘social’ for brevity, but its use in the present
book’s title is intended to signal that we mean roles that are in some degree
shaping of or pervasive within a person’s life, in a way that being a promiser is not,
save perhaps insofar as it enters into the specification of a social role (marriage
vows, say). This will be a matter of degree, but it is enough to make sense of why
lorry driver seems like a role while car driving is simply something one does. The
three core features discussed above are not exhaustive of the common properties
of roles, either. When discussing or reasoning about social roles, there are several
other properties it helps to have in mind. The four we think are especially worth
mentioning are: semantics, institutional context, geography, and realization. These
are not features of all social roles, which are, as we saw, highly diverse in character;
but they do help us to spot fault-lines running through debates in this domain.
10   

The first property will seem banal: social roles often have names. Some of these,
such as ‘friend’ or ‘teacher’, are well established, whereas some social roles have no
name at all, as was presumably true of thought leaders before they began to call
themselves that. Sometimes a name can be ad hoc or metaphorical, as with the
description of someone as ‘the Art Garfunkel’ (their role is to be a good voice, so to
speak, not to write the songs). Sometimes the persistence of a label is arbitrary.
Surgery and even the use of leeches was once carried out by people called barbers,
and it is a matter of choice whether to count today’s barbers as performing a
different role with the same name, or an evolved version of the same role.
Sensitivity to the practice of naming roles can be important to debates about
their ethics. We have already seen one way in which this is true: role names, such
as ‘dad’, oscillating between characterizing someone as an occupant and charac-
terizing them as a performer. A second way is when trying to identify the
performance conditions of a role. What should teachers be required to do?
‘Teach’, comes the obvious reply. But modern teachers are required to do a
good deal besides teaching in the narrow sense, including administrative and
social welfare work. Is that what ‘teaching’ means now? That seems a stretch. But
nor does it seem reasonable for a teacher to reject such duties purely on semantic
grounds. There is an interesting debate here about how to interpret assertions
such as one that will have a familiar ring to many reading this article: ‘I’m an
academic, and that means doing both teaching and research, not just teaching and
administration, not obedience to a manager, and not being denied the time or
resources to contribute to society’s knowledge base.’ Is this just a semantic claim,
open to refutation by an academic manager who simply refuses to accept the
stipulation? Or is it a semantic claim rooted in some real essence of the social role
of academic? Another possibility is that it is a claim about what a well-designed
institution of higher learning should have at its core, in the same way that a ferry
company should have at its core things that move across water with the capacity to
carry people and vehicles. We will not try to settle the issue here, and merely note
that different roles may call for different answers. The role named by ‘teacher’ may
correspond to a métier, but the one labelled ‘Systems quality assurance analyst:
marketing’ seems to be more about slotting into the requirements of an
institution.
This brings us neatly to our next ‘other property’: many social roles have an
institutional context. Professional roles such as academic and lawyer certainly do.
It may be possible to have roles with no institution, as with a musical band or a
casual friendship, unless one stretches the word ‘institution’ to mean any social
group. Other roles seem to belong to more than one institution. If I am someone’s
sibling, then I am so within the context of a family, which might be called the host
institution. But alongside that particular family I am also participating in ‘the
institution of the family’, which is society-wide, period-specific, and often harder
to nail down. The role of spouse, too, implies a social and legal framework
         11

alongside the particular family created or extended through the act of marrying.
One can talk of the institution of friendship, too, though it is less clear this picks
out anything definite since the ‘rules’ of friendship, unlike marriage, are generally
left to the individuals in the friendship group. There is no legal framework for the
ending of a friendship as there is for divorce, for example. This contrast brings out
why institutionality matters in debates about the ethics of social roles: the insti-
tutions associated with social roles are a potential source of both its normative
content—its occupancy and performance conditions as we have been putting it—
and the apparent bindingness of those norms on the role’s occupants.
A third property of social roles to be alert to is their ‘geography’. As we will put
it, social roles sit within a rolescape. Both spatial metaphors seem fitting given how
we can zoom in or zoom out when we are thinking about a social role. A single
individual could be, say, a biologist at a university, but we could zoom in on that
role to discover that, for this individual, it consists in part in their doing some
teaching, or more specifically still of their doing some first-year undergraduate
teaching, alongside much else. These are subsidiary roles, not extra and on top of
the role of their being a professional biologist, and they do not represent the only
possible way of having that role. Equally, we might zoom out and see the
individual as occupying the role of academic (as opposed to biologist in particu-
lar), or further out still, to the roles of educated professional and citizen. Each of
these may bring with it certain responsibilities or entitlements. The situation here
is analogous to one familiar from discussions of action in philosophy of mind.
Suppose someone fires a gun. If we zoom in, we see that they pulled a trigger. If we
zoom out, we see that they have murdered someone. As with roles, the relatively
fine-grained actions correspond to ways of implementing the relatively course-
grained ones, not numerically distinct actions. But notice that human beings do
also sometimes occupy more than one social role, and this multiplicity is achieved
without the different roles nesting within one another. Jaques again: ‘One man in
his time plays many parts’. He meant in sequence, but one man can also end up
playing many parts at the same time, which can give rise to friction, paradigmat-
ically in the case of those juggling the role of care-giver at home with that of
employee—though that particular friction has typically been experienced less by
men than by women.
This last example also illustrates an important feature of the rolescape: the
social roles that populate it, and hence the repertoire of social roles available to
take on, are not fixed. Gender roles, along with the language used to describe
them, change over time. Like social roles more generally they are malleable,
morphing under various pressures, including recognizably ethical pressures. The
mutability of the rolescape is linked to the fourth and final property to beware of
when thinking about the ethics of social roles, which is that in any particular
society and period, some social roles are realized while others are not. We will not
attempt to say here what it is for a role to be realized, save to say that it looks to be
12   

an instance of a question discussed in social ontology as a whole (on which see

Epstein 2018). Roles that have lost reality may have been forgotten or may be
remembered, fondly or otherwise (e.g. lighthouse keeper, lord of the manor), and
roles that have yet to exist (e.g. citizen of the world) may be championed or
lampooned. Some roles are effectively inconceivable from within some social
settings. An example, venture capitalist viewed from the perspective of feudal
Europe, is a reminder that realizing or extinguishing a role is not, or is not always,
simply a matter of having a good idea. Social roles are woven into the fabric of
society and not just of organizations, informal groups, or families. Realizing or
eliminating them can entail society-wide transformation. Any account of the
ethics of social roles will for that reason often have a socio-political element.

3. Questions for an Ethics of Social Roles

One ambition we have for this volume is that it should energize work on the ethics
of social roles. To that end, in this section we offer Nine Outstanding Questions in
the field as it now stands. Some of these arise from points made in Section 2, and
they are all expressed in the language introduced there. The questions are inter-
connected, inevitably, and a plausible answer to any one of them is going to
presuppose a credible answer to at least some of the others, and indeed a plausible
perspective on neighbouring literatures (see Section 4 below).

Q1 What is a social role?

We have already offered a tentative, broad, default answer to this, but that answer
is open to refinement or indeed rejection. Definitions are always theoretically
committed, in normative ethics as in any other sphere of enquiry. The group of
things that we might initially think of as roles could turn out not to belong to a
single kind, with a unified ethics, and this might be reflected in one’s operating
definition of social role (Thomas 1987, 230; Jeske, this volume). It is easy, too, to
envisage perspectival divisions like those found elsewhere in philosophy, such as
between reductionism, the view that social roles are compounded out of (and
inherit their properties from) other socio-ethical categories, and anti-reductionist
alternatives that treat social roles as a sui generis category.

Q2 When should an existing social role be defended, when should it be

reluctantly tolerated, and when should it be actively eradicated; or, if it
is not currently realized, when should it be introduced or resisted?

In the terminology we introduced earlier, this is a question about the kinds of roles
we want realized in our rolescape. We take this question to include questions
         13

about whether a role should be reformed, not just whether it should be displaced,
since that distinction will often be arbitrary (see our point about semantics, above).

Q3 Why do the norms associated with social roles have a claim on us (if
indeed they do)?

This is a question about the source of the normative force attaching to or governing
roles. For role obligations to bind us, must they be in some sense contractual in
nature, whether through our consent or more weakly through our identification
with the role (see Hardimon 1994; Simmons 1996; Sciaraffa 2011)? Or, might role-
normativity be conventional in nature, and so potentially not subject to consent
yet binding all the same (Taylor, this volume)? Lastly, could some or even all roles
have a distinct and possibly sui generis source—as with, perhaps, the special
norms arising out of strong familial bonds (Jeske 1998; Kane 2019)?

Q4 If the norms associated with a role (including both its occupancy and
performance conditions) are not clearly specified, how can we determine
which actions it prescribes? Even if the norms are clearly specified, e.g. in
a robust code of conduct, how should we evaluate the codes themselves?

Unlike Q3, this is a question (or two closely related questions) about a social role’s
normative content rather than about the source of its normative power. The next
question is about neither the source nor the content of a social role’s normativity
but about its reach.

Q5 When may a social role’s occupants ignore or override its prescriptions,

and to what extent are they entitled or obliged to shape the role themselves?

This question turns on a tension at the heart of the way social roles operate in
practice. On the one hand, social roles are a tool, and like any tool they exist to
serve humanity rather than the other way round. Non-optimal roles should
therefore be open to challenge, we might think, not least by the occupant, who
will often have special insights. On the other hand, and again as with any tool,
social roles need to be respected and used properly if they are to do their job. You
don’t get efficient collaboration if every occupant of a role is challenging its
dictates at every turn.

Q6 If it has one, how independent is a role from its host institution?

This question overlaps with several of the previous ones but is framed as a
question about the extent to which the institutions to which social roles often
belong are final arbiters. It also raises the question of what should steer the
14   

decisions of the institution. This illustrates a point made at this section’s outset,
that answers to any one of these questions must ultimately be part of a package
that answers them all. The final three questions show that answers also need to be
informed by perspectives in adjacent fields, several of which are described in
Section 5.

Q7 How does role occupancy inform the self-conception and wellbeing of the
occupant, or of someone barred from occupancy?

This question in turn raises the question of how access to roles, and the social
goods (or in some cases harms) that come with that access, should be governed in
a just society:

Q8 How should theories of social justice accommodate the twin phenomena

of fulfilling-but-scarce roles and unfulfilling-but-necessary roles?

Our final question concerns the conflicts that can arise between the demands of
two or more different roles, sometimes occupied by different individuals and
sometimes occupied by a single individual.

Q9 Is there an ethical perspective we should take that sits above the norms
attached to particular roles, which we can and should look to if we need to
settle questions about their ethics?

This last question has both practical and theoretical resonance. Practical: most of
us have been in the situation of not knowing how to act because we are unsure
which hat we should be wearing, or whether we should be taking all hats off and
responding sub specie aeternitatis, assuming there is such a thing. The abolition of
slavery was justified by appeal to a universal humanistic ethics, yet other cases are
less straightforward. Being a spy unquestionably requires dishonesty, and much of
what Machiavelli says about political leadership in The Prince (1999 [1532]) is still
pertinent today (Tillyris 2015). So, must a spy or a political leader choose between
their role and morality? Theoretical: this question is asking, in effect, how the
ethics of roles should mesh with the rest of normative ethics. A good answer to it
will need to be informed as much by one’s wider ethical perspective as by one’s
views on social roles.

4. Related Ethical Debates

Social roles figure in several neighbouring branches of ethical, social, and political
philosophy, in ways often acknowledged only in passing in the relevant literatures.
         15

Social roles arguably constitute a kind of missing link between these other debates,
and recognizing these interconnections has the potential to bring clarity across the
board. In this section we briefly highlight how social roles sit in relation to six
more established ethical topics: collective agency, impartiality and special relation-
ships, wellbeing, social justice, dirty hands, and discussions of specific social roles.
Interest in the metaphysics and ethics of collective (or group) agency has surged
over the past few decades (French 1984; Rovane 1998, 2004; Gilbert 1996; Schmitt
2004; Miller and Mäkelä 2005; Sheehy 2007; Isaacs 2011; List and Pettit 2011;
Lawford-Smith 2012; Tollefsen 2015; Hess, Igneski, and Isaacs 2018; Thomasson
2019). Any social group or collective is made up of individuals, and the relation-
ship between these individuals and the collective can usefully be thought of as
mediated by their roles within it (Miller 2010, 52–54; Ritchie 2018, 22). The
framework of occupancy and performance conditions outlined above helps us to
see why. Thus, what we have been calling ‘occupancy’ looks to be what constitutes
membership of a group, whether it be a highly structured organization (Ludwig
2017, 2) or more of an aggregate, such as people on a cruise ship or in a country. It
is not easy, certainly, to see how one could be the member of a collective without
having some role or other within it, however passive (, , ,
 ). In addition, an individual’s contribution to the agency of a
collective (as opposed to their bare membership of it) looks to be nothing other
than their performance, effectively or negligently as it may be, of their role. If this
is right, then many established debates over the metaphysics and ethics of
collective agency will be intimately tied to debates over the nature and ethical
properties of roles (Collins 2016, 2017).
A second related literature is that of impartiality and special relationships.
Certain relationships, such as friendship or familial bonds, have puzzled ethicists
because they seem to justify attitudes and behaviours that pull against the spirit of
impartiality (Scheffler 1997; Jeske 2001, 2019; Keller 2013), a spirit that to many
has seemed central to the very notion of morality, which is why Lady Justice wears
a blindfold. Viewing our positions in these special relationships as roles may help
us to resolve this tension, though any such dividend will depend on us also having
an improved understanding of the ethics of roles more generally. But for example,
and again using the framework of the previous section, we might better under-
stand debates about friendship if we distinguish questions over when and how to
enter or exit a friendship from questions about how to behave when in one.
Putting it this way makes friendships sound rather like quagmires of duties and
demands, making a mystery of the fact that we prize our friendships as a primary
source of human wellbeing. That holds true of our social-role relationships more
generally, which is why they deserve a higher place in a third existing literature, or
rather cluster of literatures, dealing with wellbeing, self-conception, and identity
(Brunning 2018). Sociologists have been ahead of philosophers, here, at least since
Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), as have
16   

philosophers outside the mainstream English-language tradition—think of

Simone de Beauvoir’s account of womanhood or Jean-Paul Sartre’s waiter
(Beauvoir 1973 [1949], 301; Sartre 2018 [1943], 102–103; and see Smith, this
volume). In any case, what we are and do, how others regard us, how we regard
ourselves, are all ingredients in how well a person’s life is going for that person and
are all intimately tied to the social roles we occupy. A comprehensive theory of the
nature and value of wellbeing must therefore recognize and accommodate role-
generated personal fulfilment.
Discussions of wellbeing (or welfare) are themselves closely related to discus-
sions of the nature of social justice. Social roles are occupied by individual agents,
but they are also parts of wider social structures and so it will be important to be
able to recognize when certain roles are parts of unjust, oppressive structures
(Kisolo-Ssonko 2019), and when roles could afford their occupants opportunities
to ameliorate injustices (Zheng 2018; Isaacs, this volume). Another debate con-
cerns the types and patterns of roles a just society could or should instantiate. To
put it bluntly, some roles are more rewarding than others. The ones we get to
occupy and perform shape our lives, even to the point of making or breaking
them. How should theories of social justice incorporate this fact about roles? How,
for example, can the egalitarian impulse be reconciled with the obvious need for a
diversity of roles? Should what we have called the ‘rolescape’ be manipulated into
something humane and fair, or would such manipulation inevitably be inefficient,
a violation of personal liberty, or both?
Our fifth example of an adjacent literature is the one on the problem of dirty
hands (Walzer 1973; de Wijze 2007; Coady 2009). This is a peculiar kind of moral
conflict in which a person must do evil to do right, or in Michael Stocker’s words,
do what is ‘justified, even obligatory, but none the less wrong and shameful’
(1990, 9). The problem has been cast as particularly acute or pervasive for political
actors and roles of high public office, especially those serving pluralistic democ-
racies (Bellamy 2010; Archard 2013). But the dirty hands conflict can potentially
arise for a wider range of social roles. A spy is obliged qua spy to engage in lying—
an honest spy is a rubbish spy. On the assumption that spy is not a role we
should banish to the museum of history to sit alongside slave owner and
absolute monarch, we seem to have to acknowledge that lying is not always the
universal moral transgression it is commonly assumed to be. The dirty-hands
puzzle, viewed from this role perspective, is a question about whether, how, and
why role requirements sometimes bypass, place limits on, or violate ordinary
moral standards. It raises the possibility that the assumption of an ‘ordinary’ or
role-neutral morality is a fantasy; but even if we decide it is not a fantasy, we are
left facing the question of how role-situated and role-transcendent norms are
supposed to interact. A better understanding of the ethics of roles, building on
existing work on dirty hands, ought to help us address these questions.
Finally, although the volume aims to further our understanding of the ethics of
roles as such, its contributions are inevitably informed by—and will in turn
         17

inform—literatures on specific social roles within applied ethics. We have already

mentioned friendship, but others include gender roles (Moller Okin 1989;
Haslanger 2012, chapter 7), military roles (Sandin 2007), business roles (Sternberg
2000; Swanton 2007), medical roles (Alexandra and Miller 2009; Cribb 2011), legal
roles (Luban 1988; Dare 2009); the roles of engineer (Nichols 1997) and journalist
(Harcup 2007), and familial roles (Jeske 1998).

5. The Contributions to This Volume

If the topic of social roles and their ethics were better established, and if this were a
handbook, we might have asked contributors to address some specified sub-
literature or sub-topic, perhaps by dishing out some variant of our Nine
Outstanding Questions (Section 3). We were not in that situation, so we instead
invited authors to explore the unexplored, to follow their instincts as to which
questions most urgently needed examining and which points deserved greater
recognition. What has resulted is thus, unsurprisingly but pleasingly, wide in
scope. While it ranges over each of those nine questions there is no neat mapping.
Indeed, the contributors have helped us as editors to see just how multifaceted this
topic is, and this introductory chapter has been shaped by that discovery.
Individual abstracts summarizing each contribution appear prior to this chap-
ter, and we will not attempt replication here. Instead, we limit ourselves to giving a
brief overview of how they fit together in the volume’s four parts.

Part One: Historical Foundations

As the philosophical silos imposed by history and geography collapse, it has

become increasingly difficult to make plausible generalizations. Accordingly,
whilst our earlier claim that social roles are a neglected topic is true of recent
and contemporary anglophone normative ethics, critical discussion of social roles
and their ethics thrives, or has thrived, in other intellectual ecosystems. The
contributions to Part One make this clear by advancing contemporary debates
in role ethics through four historical lenses. These are: women in Confucian ethics
(Jing Iris Hu), the Homeric tradition via Alasdair MacIntyre (Sophie Grace
Chappell), John Dewey’s pragmatism (John Simons), and the ethics of the
Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup (Robert Stern).

Part Two: The Nature and Normativity of Roles

The second part of the volume comprises work on roles in metaethics, social
ontology, and social and political philosophy. Its diverse contributions have in
18   

common their asking questions about the power of social roles, by which we mean
the way roles appear both to exert normative force on their occupants and to serve
as a potential source of political power. In the former sense of normative force,
Erin Taylor considers, and answers, the question of whether and how the con-
ventional obligations of social roles are morally binding on occupants, whilst Reid
Blackman develops an account of a class of normative reasons grounded distinctly
in social roles. In the latter sense of potential political power, Tracy Isaacs argues
that seeing membership of certain social groups as roles can help explain the
obligations those role occupants have to resist and ameliorate oppressive social
structures of which their groups are part.

Part Three: Roles, Institutions, and Organizations

The topic of this section, broadly speaking, is the social constitution of roles. Three
of the chapters focus on what we might call paradigm social roles—those circum-
scribed by social institutions (Sean Cordell), organizations (Stephanie Collins),
and employers (Thomas H. Smith)—and on what requirements such roles gen-
erate for their occupants. Each of these three pieces tackles that question by
starting with the thought that, in one way or another, roles or their host social
structures have certain functions or purposes. Diane Jeske, on the other hand, uses
such socially determined or ‘institutional’ social roles as a foil to argue—and not
merely stipulate—that ‘friend’ is like a bat among birds, so to speak. Despite its
similarity to certain social roles involving intimate relationships, friendship is in
important respects so much unlike those paradigm cases that we ought not to
think of ‘friend’ as a social role at all.

Part Four: Wellbeing, Selfhood, and Roles

The final part of the volume moves into the realm of moral psychology, consid-
ering roles’ influence on or constituting of their human subjects. The mood of this
section is upbeat, focusing as it does on benefits and goods which roles afford their
occupants. By looking at autobiographical exposition, Samuel Clark gives an
analysis of different ways in which some roles can be, and are, basic ingredients
in good human lives. Alex Barber discusses the wellbeing of individuals which
obtains only through their being part of a social collective. On his account,
recognizing that we occupy certain roles within such collectives is key to under-
standing such ‘participatory’ wellbeing. Luke Brunning takes seriously, but rejects,
the common suspicion that one person’s occupying multiple contrasting roles is
inimical to their integrity or good. On the contrary, he argues, managing a
diversity of roles in the right ways can, for several reasons, be a good thing for a
person to do.
         19

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 PART ONE
HI STO R I CAL F OUNDA TIONS
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
HERE AND THERE IN MARYLAND
BY EDWARD G. McDOWELL.
Near Pen-Mar, Western Maryland Railroad.
Old Mill Race, Walbrook.
Near Annapolis.
In Green Spring Valley.
The Old Liberty Road.
Tred Avon River.
On Gwynn’s Falls.
Smith’s Lane, Walbrook.
 HOW RANDALL GOT INTO THE
SALON

It was fully a minute before Joe Randall could summon up his

courage to knock. He was ordinarily a phlegmatic Englishman, not
easily moved, but to-day he was out of breath from an exceptionally
long walk, and the excitement which invariably attends the first visit
of an inconsequential young art student to the studio of a world-
renowned painter. At length he resolutely pulled himself together and
rapped. He received in reply a command, rather than an invitation, to
enter. In obedience to the imperative summons he slowly pushed the
massive door ajar and the next instant perceived he was standing in
the actual, awful presence of the famous Master. The shock
produced on him by the sudden change from the comparative
darkness of the hall to the fierce, out-of-door light of the studio,
blinded and troubled him nearly as much as did the contrast of his
own littleness and poverty with the evidences of oppressive
affluence and power before him. In his confusion a large, weather-
beaten canvas, ill-tied and wrapped in an old journal, which he had
carried under his arm all the way over from the Latin Quarter to far-
away Montmartre, slipped from its flimsy envelope and fell with a
resounding bang upon the floor, thereby adding to his already great
embarrassment. He stooped nervously to pick it up, giving vent at
the same time to a half audible “Bon jour!”
He had timed his visit so as not to interfere with the Master’s
morning work, and noticed with a feeling of satisfaction and returning
confidence, that the model had gone, and that the Master himself
was languidly engaged in cleaning up his palette. The Master, on his
part, was evidently used to visits of the kind from other shabbily-
dressed young men, for he promptly roared back, “Bon jour,” and
even added “mon ami!” in tones in which it would have been difficult
to detect a single friendly note. The unexpectedness of the second
part of the greeting served partially to reassure Randall, and enabled
him to explain the cause of his intrusion.
“I have come,” he began in halting, broken French, “to ask you if
you will criticise a picture which I intend to submit to the Salon jury
next month? I am not a pupil of yours at present, although I have
studied for a short time under you at Julian’s,—before I entered
Monsieur Rousseau’s class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where I am
now working. I have been told that you are always willing to give
advice to young men of your profession, and especially to those
who, like myself, have once been members of your school.”
The Master, who was a fat, energetic little man of about sixty,
glared at the intruder from under a pair of bushy eyebrows, as
though he were trying to look him through and through and read if he
had any other motive in coming to call upon him; and then, with a
movement bordering on brusqueness, whisked the canvas from his
trembling hand and placed it on a vacant easel by his side. He
intended no unkindness by his action, as Randall soon found out for
himself. He was only authoritative, and this was his habitual manner
towards friend and foe alike, as well as the secret that underlay his
success and power in the artistic world. For power he certainly had;
not the kind perhaps that comes from fine achievement or a noble
personality, but a sort of brutal, political,—and as he put it,
“administrative”—power, which caused him to be courted and feared,
and enabled him to make and unmake the reputations of countless
of his fellow craftsmen. It was an open secret that he managed the
only Salon then in existence practically as he pleased, and put in or
put out all those whom he happened at the moment either to like or
dislike; that he medalled, or left without recompense, whomsoever
he chose; and that on more than one occasion (it must be confessed
to his shame) he had even unjustly withheld the official honors from
those who were most eminently entitled to receive them.
He regarded the picture with the stony stare of the Sphinx for what
appeared to Joe Randall to be an eternity, and then, turning
suddenly towards him, said, with astounding candor—perfected by a
long and constant cultivation,—“Personally, I don’t like your picture at
all: It is a landscape, even if there are two unimportant little figures in
it, and landscapes, however well done, are of little consequence and
prove nothing. This one, with the exception of the distance, which is
passably good, is not comprehensively treated; the foreground is not
at all right in values and doesn’t explain itself; it is, in fact, a wretched
piece of work and spoils whatever small merit there may be in the
picture. Can’t you yourself see that it does so?”
Randall had thought his picture fairly good when he had taken it
away from his poor little studio in the Latin Quarter that morning, but
here, in the midst of all these gorgeous surroundings, he had to
admit that it looked insignificant enough.
“If I were in your place,” the Master continued, “I should not waste
any more time on that production, but would paint a figure piece—a
Jeanne d’Arc, or some classical, or Biblical subject: pictures of this
kind always create a sensation in the Salon, and—get three-fourths
of the recompenses besides,” he added shrewdly.
“But it is too late to do that this year,” answered Joe; “there is
barely a month before the pictures must be sent to the Palais de
l’Industrie.”
“That is true,” admitted the Master wearily.
“I must send this picture in,” continued Joe, “or nothing.”
“Then,” replied the Master promptly, “I would send in nothing.”
 Randall was silenced and thoroughly discouraged by this
rejoinder. He thought bitterly over his want of success. He had sent
pictures to the three preceding Salons, and all of them had been
declined. If he followed the advice just given him he would have to
wait a whole year before he would have another chance to make his
bow to the public as a real, a professional painter. It was too
maddening and the more he thought about it the more miserable he
became. He showed this state of feeling plainly in his face, and the
Master forgot himself long enough to notice it, and to his own very
great astonishment was touched.
“Is it very important that you should exhibit something this year?”
he inquired in a kinder voice.
“Yes,” replied Joe, nearly bursting into tears, “it is of the utmost
importance to me. I have been refused for three years in succession,
and if I do not get something into the Salon this spring, my father will
think that my picture has been rejected again, and will probably send
for me to come home and make me give up art.”
“In that case,” said the Master firmly, “we must get you in.”
He walked over to his Louis XV desk and picked up a small red
note-book, bound in Russia leather, which was filled with the names
of his private pupils and alphabetically and conveniently arranged.
“What is your name, young man?” he asked; and on receiving his
reply, he turned the page reserved for the R’s and wrote down
hastily, “Randall, J.—landscape.” “Now,” he went on, “do what I tell
you! Go home and paint up that foreground more carefully. Even I
could not get my associates to vote for it as it stands. I will see to the
rest—don’t worry! You can count on me!”
Randall, light-hearted once more, expressed his thanks profusely
for these highly comforting assurances, and was on the point of
departing when the Master abruptly demanded, “Why didn’t you go
to the Pere Rousseau, instead of coming to me? He is your teacher
now, not I!”
“I did go to him.” admitted Randall, blushing deeply, “and he said
my work wasn’t half bad, and⸺”
 “But did you ask him to speak a good word for you to the jury?”
inquired the Master maliciously.
“Yes,” nodded Randall, smiling but blushing still more deeply. “I felt
that so many of the professors protected their pupils that it was only
fair that I should receive the same treatment.”
“Well! what then?” demanded the Master, ill-concealing an
irrepressible tendency to laugh.
“He became very angry and ordered me out of his place,”
responded Joe. “He said that any man who was not strong enough
to get into the Salon on his own merit, ought to be thrown out.”
The Master was rolling over and over on his divan in a most
indecorous way, holding his plump hands on his plump sides, in an
explosion of merriment. Then, suddenly realizing how undignified his
behavior must appear, he recovered his composure with a jerk, and
remarked thoughtfully, with just a tinge of pity in his voice, “The Pere
Rousseau—the dear old man—always acts like that when he is
requested to protect anyone! He is a sort of modern Don Quixote
and can’t understand how matters are arranged to-day. If it weren’t
for me—his best friend—he wouldn’t see the work of many of his
pupils in the Salon; and let me add, young man, that it is a mighty
good thing for you that you could say just now you were a pupil of his
and not of some of the other so-called artists I could name to you if I
chose.”
The Master’s eyebrows became ominously contracted again, and
he only deigned to snap out a ferocious “Bon jour!” to the departing
Randall, omitting the more cordial “mon ami” of the first salutation.
The annual banquet given by the Alumni and the present students
of the Atelier Rousseau, was offered to that distinguished artist, as
was usual, just before the opening of the colossal Parisian picture
show. It was also, as usual, a very gay affair. The Pere Rousseau
himself, affable and stately, appeared punctually on the scene of the
festivities and was promptly ensconced in a huge armchair,
thoughtfully placed half way down a long vista of coarse, but snowy,
tablecloth. Opposite to him, in another similar armchair, sat his best
friend—the Master, to whom Randall had so recently gone for
advice. He was radiant and happy; a sense of duty well done
pervaded his entire personality. The dinner—a truly marvelous
production at the price—was eaten with avidity by the younger men,
who were not used to such luxury every day, and with a good-
natured tolerance by Monsieur Rousseau, the Master, and those few
of the guests who had been born with silver spoons in their mouths,
or whose feet were, by their own creditable endeavors, firmly planted
on the highroad which leads to fame and fortune. Such small
formality as existed at the commencement of the feast gradually
disappeared and, when the inevitable champagne was finally
brought forth, there were not over a hundred individuals with a
hundred diverse interests present, but one great human family,
presided over by a dearly loved and affectionate father. Then
speeches were made, and Lecroix, the most irrepressible, fun-loving
man in the school, became bold enough to produce a Punch and
Judy booth from a room nearby and proceeded to give an audacious
parody on the Atelier and its illustrious chief.
Randall not having heard from his picture, and dying to know its
fate, managed, under the pretence of seeing the performance better,
to work his way up close to the Master’s chair. The Master saw him
and smiled: “It is all right,” he whispered, “you are well placed, nearly
on the line in the Salle d’Honneur. Why, however, did you change
your picture so much? The distance was fairly good when you
showed it to me at my studio, and you ought only to have worked on
the foreground. The changes you have made in the composition
were so badly done, and ill-advised, that I had to fight hard, I can tell
you, against a pack of over-conscientious fellows, before I could get
them to vote for it at all. If it hadn’t been lunch time, and so many of
them were hungry and wanted to leave, rather than to dispute over
pictures, I don’t think that even I could have managed them
satisfactorily.”
“But,” interrupted Joe in astonishment, “I didn’t change the
composition a bit. I only altered the foreground as you told me to do.”
“Then there must be some mistake,” said the Master uneasily. “But
no! Here we are.” He produced his faithful note book from his pocket
and fumbled its pages until he came to the one devoted to the R’s,
and pointed to the words he had written over a month before,
“Randall, J.—landscape;” after which he had scribbled with a blue
pencil the words “Accepted” and “John.” “You did not give me your
first name when I wrote this here, so I copied it down afterwards from
your picture when I saw that it was safely and desirably hung. You
see that it’s all right after all: you almost made me feel for the
moment as though there were some error.”
“But there is a mistake!” groaned the young man in his agony, “my
first name is Joseph, not John, and you have protected some body
else whose last name and initial happen to be the same as mine.”
“’Cre nom de nom!” whistled the master profanely.

John Randall—an American from Vermont—returned from the

Salon on Varnishing Day. He sat down and wrote to his people
across the water, telling them triumphantly the news of his
acceptance—the bare fact of which he had cabled to them the week
before. He described graphically the memorable opening day, and
thus ended up his letter:
“You have heard no doubt long ago that I have passed the difficult
test of the Salon jury, and that my very first picture has been
accepted. I am all the more pleased and proud over the result
because it was received solely on its own merits. I painted it by
myself, without any outside advice or criticism, and did not solicit the
protection of the professors of the school, as I found, to my disgust,
so many of my comrades were engaged in doing. Besides the fact of
getting in under these circumstances, I am also pleased to be able to
tell you that the hanging committee have seen fit to give me one of
the very best places in the whole Salon—in the Gallery of Honor.
Having done so well with my first picture, I feel that I am fully justified
in anticipating a like measure of success with my second.
Give my love to all at home, and believe me,
Most affectionately your,
JOHN RANDALL.”
—Clinton Peters.
 A VALENTINE.
I send my heart across the years to you!
With all its humanness and all its waste;
With all that yet is tender and is true,
Though time has triumphed and youth’s hope disgraced.

What though the snows are gathered on the ground,

And bare the bough within the aching chill?
I think of you—and in my ear a sound
Breaks, and enraptures with its April thrill!

I hear the trailing hem of laggard Spring,

And daffodils seem leaning to my hand,
And on the air I glimpse the eager wing
Of birds that wander from a softer land.

And I forget—forget the world of loss,

The drift and change of things, the pain of age:
For dreams have turned to gold life’s gifts of dross;
A sweetness lingers on time’s yellowed page.

I send my heart across the years to you

As missive of the season’s hallowed day,
To you who make the heavens seem so blue—
Make love forget its livery’s grown gray:

—Maurice Weyland.
 ELENA’S DAUGHTERS
BY D. RAMON ORTEGA Y FRIAS
From the Spanish by L. Solyom.

CHAPTER I.
DOÑA ELENA, DOÑA LUZ, DOÑA ESTRELLA.

Never, either in the times when the Spaniards were ruled by a

King who was the best of cavaliers and worst of poets—yet still a
poet—a King who paid too much attention to pretty women, and
none whatever to affairs of state,—nor yet up to the present time,
has any one known or hoped to know the history of the famous
Elena and her three daughters who have acquired a fame scarcely
inferior to her own. Yet it has become known. We know it, and the
reader shall know all that afterwards happened to these three
women and to their mother, who made them worthy of the celebrity
which they acquired.
Doña Elena used to affirm that she was the widow of an “Alcalde
de casa y corte” (a sort of justice of the peace), and that she was
able to live decently and at ease on the property consisting of her
marriage portion and what her husband had left her; and certainly
she did live in this style. She was very devout, went to mass every
day, to confession and communion every Sunday, and there was
never a religious festival at which she was not present. She received
no visitors except a Dominican friar, a very virtuous man; a
gentleman who was very rich, old, and belonged to the order of
Santiago, who never left the cross except when he went to sleep,
and then only because he had another at the head of his bed; and a
retired captain, lame and one-eyed, who had once held an important
position in the Indies. Neither their age, characters, nor condition
could give rise to any suspicion, or give any reason for censure.
The widow had three daughters, grown to womanhood, and
brought up in the fear of God, as they must have been with such a
mother. It was supposed that they wanted to get married, which was
very natural, yet as they never gave any cause for scandal, it was
impossible not to recognize their virtue. As far as could be
ascertained, the family was as honorable as any other, and led a
saintly life, yet the widow and her daughters were looked upon with a
certain avoidance, some distrust and some fear. Why? Nobody
knew. The suspicions, though apparently unjust, were instinctive.
People persisted in their determination to see something
mysterious in the family, and that was enough. When the occasion
arises, we shall repeat some of the grave and extraordinary things
that were said about them, things touching the miraculous and
supernatural; but, as no one could affirm that he had actually seen
anything, it was all hearsay, and there was reason to suppose that
an evil-disposed, hidden and despicable enemy had spread these
reports, in order to harm the widow and her daughters with impunity.
Many people came to this sensible conclusion, but still there was
always some doubt left, and a lack of confidence was justifiable
because the vox populi might be right, and it has always been
considered better to err on the side of prudence than that of daring.
If the enemy was some discarded suitor, who was resolved that no
one else should have what he could not obtain, he might well have
rejoiced at the success of his scheme, for it was not an easy thing for
these three girls to find husbands while such doubts and rumors