Tim Dare

Christine Swanton

Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation. This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates: What are roles and what is their normative import? To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general? Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine? How does practical reason function in relation to roles? Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life.

Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation

Perspectives in Role Ethics

W. Bradley Wendel

Professional roles are often thought to bring role-specific permissions and obligation, which may allow or require role-occupants to do things they would not be permitted or required to do outside their roles, and which as individuals they would rather not do. This feature of professional roles appears to bring them into conflict both with ‘ordinary’ or non-role morality, and with personal integrity which is often thought to demand some form of personal endorsement of one’s conduct. How are we to reconcile the demands of roles with ordinary morality and with personal integrity? This collection draws together a set of papers which explore these questions as they bear upon a number of different professional roles, including those of the lawyer, the judge and the politician, and from a variety of perspectives, including contemporary analytic moral theory, jurisprudence, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and contextualism, and, more broadly, from philosophy and legal academia and practice.

Professional Ethics and Personal Integrity

A book whose text is confirmed by a marvellous gallery of illustrations portraying the migrants - from all around the world - from the 18th century to the bicentenary 1988.

A Nation of Immigrants

Australia

There is a widespread perception that even when lawyers are acting squarely within their roles, being good lawyers, they display the vices of dishonesty and deviousness. At the heart of the perception is the so called standard conception of the lawyer’s role according to which lawyers owe special duties to their clients which render permissible, or even mandatory, acts that would otherwise count as morally impermissible. Many have concluded that the standard conception should be set aside. This book suggests that the moral implications of the standard conception are often mischaracterised. Critics suggest that the conception requires lawyers to secure any advantage the law can be made to give. But Dare offers a moral argument for the conception, according to which it justifies a more limited and moderate sphere of professional conduct than is normally supposed, allowing lawyers to preserve their integrity while giving proper weight to the role-differentiated permissions and obligations of their roles.

Tim Dare

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