Center for Clinical Bioethics

Sarah Harper, PhD

Section: Edmund D. Pellegrino Fellows

Research Proposal Summary

Recent decades have brought a renewed interest in roles among moral philosophers. Yet, contemporary role theorists have tended to view the concept of a role as having restricted application. By contrast, I have argued that it is both theoretically and practically advantageous to extend the application of roles within moral theory so as to place them at the center of the moral life. In my efforts to re-conceive of roles for the purposes of grounding a role-centered morality, I have arrived at a definition of a moral role that shares many features in common with Dr. Pellegrino's phenomenological account of the physician-patient relationship. My primary objective as a Pellegrino Fellow is to explore the hypothesis that a role-centered morality could provide a moral-theoretical framework capable of justifying and explaining a medical ethics like that championed by Dr. Pellegrino. I have secondary interests in drawing out the implications of an anti-constructivist, virtues-based, patient-focused account of roles for concrete bioethical questions (e.g. those pertaining to physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and certain kinds of embryonic research), and in using such an account to articulate some of the social responsibilities of healthcare institutions.