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Three Concepts Of Roles, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the many themes in the work of Fred Zacharias was the question of the moral status of role obligations or how roles should be moralized. This paper, written for an issue of the San Diego Law Review dedicated to the memory of Professor Zacharias, explores three alternative ways of conceiving of the relationship between morality and role obligations: strong role differentiation, which posits that roles can change the normative situation of actors; what I call the nexus view, which holds that roles are merely a shorthand for the intersection of existing ordinary moral obligations; and the concept of …