Living With Each Other: Dorothy Emmet on Social Roles and Moral Facts

Abstract In 1966, Dorothy Emmet published Rules, Roles and Relations, in which she argues that moral philosophy could stand to learn a lot by drawing on sociological research. In this paper. I will argue that Rules, Roles and Relations is deserving of much wider scholarly attention, especially in light of an explosion of scholarship focusing on contemporaries of Emmet such as Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch (the ‘Wartime Quartet’). Emmet, unlike the Quartet, has received a very minimal amount of scholarly attention. Yet, like the Quartet, Emmet rejects the fact-value distinction, endorses what can be characterized as an Aristotelian approach to ethics, and defends a form of moral cognitivism. What is more, her approach to these issues is novel (in drawing on sociological research) and thus enrichens our understanding of how certain philosophers in twentieth-century Britain sought to push back against dominant analytic approaches to moral theorizing.