Publisher's Synopsis
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.
