David Matthew

Role ethics, which emerged from the work of Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., though with important antecedents in the East and West, presents itself as an alternative to the dominant forms of contemporary normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics. Its central claims are that roles are ethically normative, constitute the personal identities of agents, and provide us with at least some moral knowledge. In my opinion, role ethics has great potential, both as a theoretical construct and as a tool for living a morally sound life. However, some scholars, notably John Ramsay, have observed that role ethics faces a troubling objection, which its proponents have thus far failed to meet. The problem is this: attempts to explain why roles have the foundational, moral significance which role ethicists attribute to them have tended to collapse role ethics into one of its rivals, sacrificing its most important ideas whilst retaining a veneer of its role-based terminology. I argue that this is a bug, not a feature. Role ethics is no less capable than virtue ethics, consequentialism or deontology of offering a coherent, independent justification of its key normative claims. To that end, this thesis offers an account of the ethical normativity of roles within the framework of role ethics. To begin, in Section One, comprising the first and second chapters, I lay some key pieces of groundwork, outlining the core features of role ethics, before defining the meaning of the term 'role.' My account begins with the principle, 'we are obliged to be good', so in Section Two I present my own preferred, foundationalist approach to justifying this first principle. In Section Three I develop my account, arguing that we can unfold the ethical normativity of roles from this first principle by way of Philippa Foot's concept of natural goodness. I suggest that if we accept the basic structure of her definition of moral goodness as a kind of non-defectiveness, but substitute roles for her preferred concept of 'natural kinds', the ethical normativity of roles can be justified whilst avoiding the danger of collapse. In connection with this, I argue that role ethics should be treated as non-derivative because familial and social roles are fundamental to personal identity. We cannot understand what we should do without understanding who we are, and we cannot understand that without acknowledging how roles shape our identities. Finally, in Section Four I address a few key, additional issues. By developing an account of the ethical normativity of roles that escapes the problem of collapse, my thesis will demonstrate the value of role ethics and show that role ethics can stand as an independent alternative to the dominant forms of Western ethics.

Among mainstream political philosophers, Charles Mills is probably best known, not as the author of The Racial Contract, but for his long-running critique of ideal theory and Rawls for his association with it. Yet the critique of ideal theory that followed the publication of The Racial Contract is prefigured in that very work, where we find in inchoate form what would be further developed later on. In the book, this early formulation of the critique occupies a small part of a larger, more general argument condemning mainstream political philosophy for the way that it has ignored race. In this paper, I explore the relation of the critique to this more general argument. It might be thought that the general argument leads inevitably to the critique of ideal theory. I will argue that this is not so. I will show how Mills’ more general argument can be made without taking the further step of critiquing ideal theorizing. The blame for why mainstream political philosophy has ignored race, and continues to ignore race, I will argue, should be placed elsewhere.

In recent work in political philosophy there has been much discussion of two approaches to theorizing about justice that have come to be called ‘ideal theory’ and ‘non-ideal theory’. The distinction was originally articulated by Rawls, who defended his focus on ideal theory in terms of a supposed ‘priority’ of the latter over non-ideal theory. Many critics have rejected this claim of priority and in general have questioned the usefulness of ideal theory. In diagnosing the problem with ideal theory, they have frequently fingered for blame the idealization it involves. In this paper I focus on one particular, much-discussed idealization—full compliance—in order to defend it. Focusing on the assumption, I argue that Rawls’s work is not ideal in the way that it is usually thought to be, is less ideal than is widely recognized, and became less ideal over time. I also argue that critics who in effect claim that it is not realistic enough simply fail to understand Rawls’s central motivation. Finally, I defend the assumption by arguing that there is an important sense in which all theories of justice must assume full compliance. Such an assumption, I argue, is needed if we are to have a plausible basis on which to judge the normative attractiveness of a theory.

This paper argues that the concept and role of ‘institutional racism’ in contemporary discussions of race should be reconsidered. It starts by distinguishing between ‘intrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their constitutive features, and ‘extrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their negative effects. It accepts intrinsic institutional racism, but argues that a ‘disparate impact’ conception of extrinsic conception faces a number of objections, the most serious being that it has no plausible account of what it is that makes extrinsically racist institutions racist. It also argues that claims about the explanatory indispensability of institutional racism are overstated (individual racism is at least as important), critiques structural approaches to racial inequality, and suggests that there is reason to doubt whether institutional reform can provide us with all that morality may require in the racial domain.