Public Roles, Private Roles, and Differential Moral Assessments of Role Performance

Abstract

Is it right to condemn the policy of the Johnson administration in Vietnam as ruthless? Was the Carter administration's policy in Iran during the occupation of the embassy weak and indecisive? Should Eisenhower have lied to Khrushchev about the U-2 overflights? Was Nixon's handling of the Watergate break-in immoral, or only incompetent? Assessment of role performance, difficult at best, is made more, and unnecessarily, problematic by a currently widespread tendency to conflate-at least to slur over the differences between-the public and the private aspects of social roles. All roles have public aspects; all have private aspects. The public aspects of some roles are so much more prominent than the private aspects that people call these public roles; I shall follow this usage. Similarly as regards the roles which, following usage, I will call private rolesthey are roles in which the private aspects are more prominent than the public aspects. Thus social roles fall into a spectrum ranging from those that are markedly private (e.g., friend, lover) to those that, though still private, take on some of the aspects of public roles (husband, wife, parent, child, teacher, pupil) to those that are markedly public (president of a corporation, air controller, chief petty officer). It is important to note, first, that the locus of a role on this spectrumthe point on the spectrum at which a role is perceived to be located when it is well performedvaries from time to time and, second, that the locus assigned to the role at any particular time varies with the varying perspectives of those making judgments about how roles ought to be acted out. The central thesis of this essay can now be shortly stated: people who view a given role as primarily public and people who view that role as primarily private will disagree about what good performance in that