Abstract
Role morality refers to the special obligations and rights that are associated with occupying certain professional roles—lawyer, doctor, journalist, soldier and others. There are a number of moral puzzles peculiar to this domain. To what extent can someone whose role involves acting in someone else’s behalf avoid being blamed for aiding him in actions he would be blamed for if acting outside that role? What is one to make of situations in which the performance of one’s role seems to call for the actors to engage in conflicting behavior, for example, two lawyers representing two disputing clients? Is it coherent to speak of some roles as involving obligations to institutions rather than to people? In this chapter the problems are spelled out, the current debate surveyed and tentatively different conclusions from the established ones are suggested.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
She does leave a small window for certain types of perspectivalism in cases in which one of the two actors is excused rather than justified in what he is doing: a prisoner who makes a justifiable jail break because he would otherwise have been killed by a fellow prisoner ends up in a tussle with the prison guard who tries to prevent him from fleeing.
- 2.
The example is merely meant to be illustrative. Various ways of making the duressdefense transitive might suggest themselves. Rather than arguing about why those strategies are unattractive, it is more fruitful to establish the general result that feasible legal systems must contain lots of doctrines that work the way the duress doctrine ordinarily works. This we do in Katz and Sandroni (2017). The same applies to other doctrinal illustrations we offer later in this section.
References
Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (N.Y. 1805).
Ploof v. Putnam, 81 Vt. 471 (1908).
Applbaum, Arthur. 1999. Ethics for adversaries. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dare, Tim. 2009. The counsel of rogues. Burlington: Ashgate.
Hacker, Andrew. 1965. The corporation take-over. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Hurd, Heidi. 2011. Moral combat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katz, Leo, and Alvaro Sandroni. 2017. The inevitability and ubiquity of cycling in all feasible legal regimes: A formal proof. The Journal of Legal Studies 46: 237–281.
Luban, David. 1989. Lawyers and justice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2007. Legal ethics and human dignity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Markovitz, Daniel. 2011. A modern legal ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Simon, William. 1998. The practice of justice: A theory of lawyers’ ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wendel, Bradley. 2010. Lawyers and fidelity to law. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Katz, L., Sandroni, A. (2019). Role Morality. In: Alexander, L., Kessler Ferzan, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22811-8_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22811-8_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-22810-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22811-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)