Role Ethics and Duty
Each person plays multiple roles — child, citizen, friend, professional — and virtue means fulfilling the duties each role entails.
Epictetus developed a role ethics based on the theatrical metaphor of life as a play. God assigns us our roles; our task is to play each part excellently. Whether born rich or poor, we have duties appropriate to our station. Virtue consists in fulfilling these duties wholeheartedly and well.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and the playwright has given you a role to play.
Role ethics in Stoicism anticipates modern virtue ethics accounts of context-sensitive moral reasoning.
Enchiridion
Written about in
- What Stoicism says about envy and comparison
Epictetus's theatrical image says you did not choose your part, only how you play it, so measuring your role against someone else's is a category error: the acting is judged, not the casting. It also sits awkwardly beside this same tradition's insistence that rank is arbitrary.