Roles and Role Morality

The notion of role morality is based on the belief that individuals and groups have certain duties and virtues as a result of the specific roles they occupy within society. A conceptual framework for understanding these specific moral obligations can be found in Greek virtue ethics. Within the thought of Aristotle, virtues were carefully cultivated character traits that were teleologically related to the good life or happiness of the community as a whole. For a community to be happy, or prosper, each individual had to cultivate the virtues specific to his or her role in society. If you were a soldier within the Greek city-state, you had to cultivate the virtue of bravery; if you were a worker, you had to be diligent; and as a ruler, you had to be wise. The communitarian philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, argues that duties and virtues are cultivated within certain practices in society and that we cannot understand our moral obligations without reference to such a social context.

A contemporary application of role-specific virtues and duties can be found within professional ethics. As a society, we expect professionals to fulfill their role properly by displaying certain virtues and responding to specific moral obligations. We trust professionals to be custodians of certain specific public goods: Legal professionals serve justice and, therefore, have to be fair; medical professionals protect and nurture our physical well-being and have to display the virtue of care; and accountants vouch for the veracity of financial statements and have to be honest. If professionals fail to protect these basic goods or neglect these virtues, society can no longer allow them to fulfill their specific roles. Arthur Andersen, the auditors in the Enron scandal, exemplifies how a lack of honesty and failure to protect the public can result in the loss of an auditing practice.

Role morality is sometimes contrasted with personal morality. Virtues and duties required in a specific role may conflict with one's personal sense of what is morally appropriate. It was Max Weber's contention that individual morality is subjugated to the functionally specific rules and roles of the bureaucratic organization. The danger that this subjugation presents is that of the compartmentalization of an individual life. Alisdair MacIntyre points out that individuals lose a sense of overriding concern for what it means to be human and stop asking moral questions apart from those required by specific roles. For example, executives may have two radically different opinions when asked about the need for environmental protections in two different capacities. When confronted with this issue in their capacity as parents, executives will typically support environmental protection, but in terms of their fiduciary duties within the corporation, they will often not feel responsible for implementing environmentally friendly business practices.

The phenomenon of amoralization, or the inability or unwillingness to recognize something as a moral issue, has also been linked to the limitations that role morality imposes on one's sense of moral imagination. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that society tends to assign legal responsibility for the avoidance of harm only to those within a specific role and not to human beings in general. For instance, within most jurisdictions, failure to assist a drowning person is not technically illegal, but a mother's allowing her child to die of neglect is. In the business environment, this is manifested in the fact that legal concepts such as the “business judgment rule” assign executives certain rights and liberties to take risks to maximize shareholder value. The flip side of this coin is that legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 increases the risk of individual liability of CEOs and CFOs by requiring sign-offs verifying the accuracy of financial statements.

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