Role Ethics and Moral Institutions of an Affluent Group

By Jeremy Aaron Evans

My dissertation defends a modern version of Role Ethics modeled on the

functioning of human moral psychology, and proposes a novel method for identifying the

institutional roles of a well-ordered collective. In particular, I defend the view that our

duties are determined by the social roles we incur in the communities we inhabit. The

companion project extends Role Ethics into the political domain. I argue that we can

identify the well-ordered collective in roughly the same way we identify the good

individual, by discerning the dispositions in the relevant agent that are conducive to its

well-being. By scaling up, we shift attention from the moral dispositions of individuals

to the moral dispositions of collectives - the institutions that determine the moral

character of a population. While philosophers have tended to focus on the formal

institutions of the state, this research is largely concerned with the 'informal institutions'

of a collective, the implicit social roles/practices constructed and enforced endogenously,

such as those involved in structuring human friendships. What I call 'Collective

Eudaimonism' is a kind of virtue ethics writ large, a normative theory tasked

with identifying correlations between a set of informal institutions and the

indicators of flourishing human collectives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CMDFKZWD
• ISBN13: 9798868957130
• Release Date: October 2023
• Publisher: Pradeep Kandimalla
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"