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

Glen Pettigrove

Much of the work that has been done on virtue has been devoted to getting virtue ethics a seat at the theoretical table. It has been concerned with showing that virtue ethics can provide a satisfactory account of right action to rival accounts offered by consequentialism and deontology. This volume of essays explores the nitty-gritty details of particular virtues. It includes original contributions from a number of leading scholars in virtue ethics. Most of the virtues discussed – such as ambition, cheerfulness, creativity, magnificence, pride, wit, and wonder – have been almost wholly neglected by contemporary ethicists. The volume also includes coverage of other virtues that have received a fair amount of attention in recent years, such as charity, hope, justice, practical wisdom, and temperance. Here the essays address largely ignored dimensions of these virtues and show how these discussions can enrich our understanding of neglected virtues. Neglected Virtues is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on virtue ethics. Its focus on individual virtues, while not meant to be exhaustive, will open new avenues for future research in this rapidly growing area of ethics and moral philosophy.

Neglected Virtues

Christine Swanton presents a new target centred virtue ethics, which is opposed to orthodox virtue ethics in two major ways. She rejects the 'natural goodness' metaphysics of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in favour of a 'hermeneutic ontology' of ethics, and she offers a new target centred framework for assessing rightness of acts.

Target Centred Virtue Ethics

This contribution to the field of virtue ethics focuses on the work of Hume and Nietzsche, providing fresh perspectives on their philosophies and a compelling account of their impact on the development of virtue ethics.

Christine Swanton

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