ABSTRACT
When Western analytic ethics has accommodated roles at all, it has tended to portray them as derivative: as depending upon more fundamental moral theories which are the real source of role-obligation. There are various explanation for this view, including a tendency to use institutional roles as the model for understanding roles in general. I think roles are themselves the source of moral obligation. I rely on accounts of the emergence of social norms from patterns of behaviour (see e.g., Hart 1997, 55-57). On these accounts, patterns of convergent behaviour in a group generate social norms when there is a general and regular pattern of behaviour within the group, together with a widely shared attitude that this pattern is a common standard of conduct to which all members of the group are required to conform. I propose a similar analysis of role-norms. They are in effect social norms generated by the widespread acceptance of the practices which constitute roles, the widespread acceptance that deviation from those practices by those identifying or identified as role-occupants warrant surprise, criticism, pressure conformity, and the widespread acceptance by role-occupants that they are subject to these conditions. When people have the internal point of view toward a role, that role provides them with reasons for action: seeing the role as providing reasons is what it is to understand the role and see oneself as a role-occupant. Their existence just consists of the facts of their acceptance and use. This account implies that role-norms are reducible not to more fundamental moral facts or accounts of what an ideal version of a practice would look like, but to what practices do in fact look like. Those practices, on this account are the social facts that generate the norms that govern all (or almost all) of our dealings with one another.
