Just Doing My Job: Normative Dimensions of Social Roles

Abstract

“What should I do?” Often, our answers make reference to our social roles: we ask what we should do as lawyers, citizens, or parents. But this confronts us with problems. Consider a would-be whistleblower, a wife challenging the gendered division of household labor, or the conflicted police officer Javert from Les Misérables. These agents feel there is a genuine conflict between morality and the norms of their role. While many philosophers treat social roles as incidental to our moral lives, this dissertation aims to do justice to this experience of roles’ normative force. I argue that doing so prompts revision to orthodox views of role-occupants’ reasons for action, blameworthiness, and responsibility for structural injustice. In Chapter One, I develop a new account of how social roles generate normative reasons for occupants to comply with role norms. I argue that agents’ reasons to comply with their role norms depend on how those norms contribute to functioning social practices. In addition to its claims about the structure of normative reasons, my view delivers a striking upshot in cases of conflict. While popular accounts of role normativity often maintain that moral considerations can cancel roles’ normative force, my project suggests a radically different conclusion: role-occupants have good reasons to comply even with norms that result in conflicts with what they morally ought to do. Social roles generate genuine normative conflicts. While many role-occupants find conflicts between roles and morality distressing, many others seem not to notice that there is a conflict at all. Consider the oft-maligned excuse: “I was just doing my job.” Chapter Two defends an epistemic variant of this excuse. I argue that agents who comply with roles’ deliberative norms may—for good reason—bracket morally relevant considerations. As a result, they may be non-culpably ignorant of wrongdoing. On some views, this can excuse them from blame. But even denying that moral ignorance exculpates is compatible with accepting role-occupants’ excuses. Such views often emphasize being motivated by the right reasons. But because role compliance is often justifiable, ignorance need not be blameworthy indifference to the right reasons. The upshot is a novel position in the debate about moral ignorance as an excuse. We might worry that this unduly lets role-occupants off the hook. If, as I argue, roleoccupants can have good reasons for acting immorally, and they can sometimes be blameless even when they do act wrongly, does that prevent us from taking those wrongs seriously? I grapple with this problem in Chapter Three. Drawing on theories of structural injustice, I argue that roles’ normative character actually generates responsibilities for justice. Because role performance both affirms and instantiates unjust structures, role-occupants bear responsibilities that can only be discharged by changing what their actions mean and do. This vindicates the widespread but philosophically puzzling view that agents ought to direct efforts towards injustices they participate in intimately, even when they could make a greater impact elsewhere. It also means that role-occupants are not off the moral hook. Ultimately, we each bear responsibility to create a more just social world.