Do We Need to Make Room for Quasi-Supererogation?

1 Introduction

Suppose you are walking past a burning building and hear a child’s screams for help coming from inside. It is plausible to think that while it would be morally admirable to run into the burning building to save the child, it is also morally optional (in that it is neither morally required nor morally forbidden). While there may well be other obligations that exist in such a situation, phoning the fire brigade for example, risking your life to save the child’s does not seem to be among them.¹ If we accept this then, as J. O. Urmson pointed out, we appear to be committed to the existence of acts that cannot be included in the categories of the forbidden, the indifferent and the obligatory.² Saving the child certainly isn’t wrong or indifferent and, as we have already seen, does not seem to be obligatory either. It seems then, that there is reason to accept the existence of a fourth category of actions that go beyond duty. Actions of this sort are called supererogatory.

In the wake of Urmson’s argument there have been a number of attempts to show that creating this fourth category of actions does not go far enough. Roderick Chisholm has argued that we need to make room for the additional category of Offence.³ This category is for acts that are bad to perform but are morally optional. Julia Driver has also argued that we need to make room for a category of this sort, though, she terms this category The Suberogatory.⁴ Gregory Mellema has argued that making room for this additional category does not go far enough either.⁵ According to Mellema we must also make room for both Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. Finally, Shlomo Cohen endorses these additional categories but argues that even this does not go far enough and that we must also make room for Forced Supererogation.⁶

The focus of this paper will be on the supposed need for the categories of Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. According to Mellema we need to make room for these categories in order to successfully capture the full range of deontic options.⁷ In this paper, I will argue that Mellema’s argument is unsuccessful. My argument will proceed as follows: In §1 I will explain Mellema’s argument in support of the need for the categories of Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. I will then, in §2, point out an alternative option available to those who accept the existence of acts that fit the criteria Mellema sets out for these categories. Rather than creating new categories we could instead widen our existing categories. I will then argue, in §3, that there is good reason to prefer this alternative. I will finish, in §4, by investigating some implications that arise if we accept my conclusion.

2 Mellema’s Argument

Mellema takes Chisholm’s analysis of the deontic scheme, which Mellema calls The Standard System, as the starting point for his argument.⁸ Chisholm divides acts into the following five categories: Obligatory, Forbidden, Supererogatory, Indifferent and Offence.⁹ While Chisholm analyzes these deontic concepts in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, Mellema analyzes them in terms of ‘praiseworthiness’ and ‘blameworthiness’. According to Mellema, then, a supererogatory act is one that fulfills no moral duty or obligation directly, is morally praiseworthy to perform and not blameworthy to omit.¹⁰ An offence, on the other hand, is an act that is morally blameworthy though morally permissible to perform, without being praiseworthy to omit.¹¹

Mellama opts for this characterization as he takes it to be the way that supererogation is standardly defined. Moreover, he takes ‘praiseworthy’ to be roughly equivalent to ‘morally good’.¹² We might reasonably object to Mellema’s claim here. One reason we might object is that praiseworthiness seems to involve an assessment of the agent as well as the act. We might think that in order for an act to be praiseworthy, it is not enough for the act to be good it must also be performed by an agent who is appropriately motivated. John Stuart Mill, for example, understands the difference between a good act and a praiseworthy act in this way claiming that, “the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent.”¹³ Similarly, Paul McNamara uses this distinction to offer a nuanced range of deontic concepts, some of which involve aretaic concepts and some of which do not.¹⁴ Nevertheless, for the purposes of this paper I do not intend to engage in an investigation of how best to define these deontic concepts. Rather, my goal is to show that Mellema’s argument for the need to add two new deontic concepts to this conceptual scheme is unsuccessful. For my purposes, then, I will accept the way that Mellema presents the existing division of the deontic field.

Having made these clarifications we can now return to Mellema’s argument. Mellema argues that this division omits two important combinations. Mellema illustrates this by listing all the possible combinations of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness for morally optional acts (those that are permissible to perform or omit). Mellema characterizes a Chisholm-type analysis as allowing for the following possible combinations amongst the morally optional acts (Table 1):

Table 1 Mellema’s standard view

When we set out the deontic categories in this way it should be clear that there are four possible combinations that are missing. Given that there are two categories, each with three possible options there will be nine possible combinations. The first additional option not covered by this grid is acts that are praiseworthy to perform but blameworthy not to perform. Mellema uses the term ‘Quasi-Supererogation’ to refer to these acts. The second are acts that are blameworthy to perform and praiseworthy not to perform. Mellema uses the term ‘Quasi-Offence’ to refer to these acts.¹⁵ The final two combinations are acts that are praiseworthy both to perform and omit and acts that are blameworthy both to perform and omit. Mellema does not focus on these combinations, as he views such acts as unlikely to be possible for human agents.¹⁶

Having demonstrated that there is space for these two new deontic categories, Mellema then provides several arguments in support of the existence of acts that fit these deontic categories. The first argument is to appeal to cases where an agent refrains from performing an offence. Mellema gives the following as an example of such a case. Suppose S is in a restaurant and is sitting next to an obnoxious man who is making mocking gestures and loud jokes about the physical disabilities of S’s wife. As a result, S is strongly tempted to walk over to the table and empty the contents of the obnoxious man’s plate onto his lap. Mellema claims that if S can resist this temptation then he does something praiseworthy.¹⁷ On the other hand, if he succumbs to temptation then he acts in a blameworthy way. In both cases these acts are morally optional. In the first case he will have performed a quasi-supererogatory act and in the second case he will have performed a quasi-offence.

The second argument Mellema gives is to appeal to cases where an agent has a series of opportunities to perform acts of supererogation. To illustrate this Mellema provides the following example:

Suppose that each Saturday I have an opportunity to drive my elderly neighbor to the supermarket. She is no longer able to drive an automobile, and each Saturday she walks a considerable distance, in spite of varicose veins, to purchase her groceries. Each Saturday the thought crosses my mind that I could spare her the trouble of walking by offering to drive her, but I always dismiss the idea on the grounds that on weekends it is my custom to relax with my coin collection.¹⁸

Mellema claims that on any given Saturday it is reasonable to think that it would be supererogatory to take the neighbor to the supermarket. As a result, then, it would not be blameworthy to choose not to help. However, Mellema claims that if this option is available every week and I never offer to help then it starts to appear blameworthy.¹⁹ As Mellema puts the point:

It is never blameworthy to refrain from performing an act of supererogation, but it can be blameworthy persistently to pass up opportunities to perform acts of supererogation.²⁰

What this shows, then, is that after a certain point I will be blameworthy if I fail to help my neighbor, even though it is supererogatory to help. Mellema claims that this gives us good reason to think that the disjunctive act of offering to help at least once is a case of quasi-supererogation.²¹ Given that each individual act would be praiseworthy to perform, it appears that the disjunctive act will also be praiseworthy to perform. However, to fail to perform the disjunctive act appears blameworthy. Of course, we might take this to be evidence that it would also be morally wrong not to perform the act. After all, we might think that this is a clear case of an imperfect duty to help. However, while Mellema accepts that there are cases where a repeated failure to perform a supererogatory act will be morally wrong, he claims that this is not one of them.²² While it may be blameworthy to fail to perform this disjunctive act, it is not morally wrong to do so, according to Mellema.

Mellema’s claim, then, is that there are some acts that do not fit into Chisholm’s five categories. In order to accommodate these acts we need to add the following categories to Chisholm’s scheme:

Quasi-Supererogation: An act that is praiseworthy to perform and blameworthy to omit.

Quasi-Offence: An act that is blameworthy to perform and praiseworthy to omit.

Note that the force of this argument comes not from the example that Mellema gives but from its structure. If acts of offence exist then, according to Mellema, there will be cases where it is praiseworthy to refrain from performing the offence. Once we have accepted that it is possible for an act to be blameworthy and morally optional it seems reasonable to think that there will be occasions where refraining from performing the blameworthy act will be praiseworthy. Similarly, if we accept that there are disjunctive acts that are morally optional whilst also praiseworthy to perform and blameworthy to omit, then we seem to be committed to the existence of acts of Quasi-Supererogation. As a result of this, if we want to give a deontic scheme that can capture the full range of possibilities we must make room for the two new categories listed above.

This conclusion is one that Mellema thinks has important implications for the debate between those who think that acts of supererogation exist and those who reject this. As Mellema points out, a common line of argument against the existence of acts of supererogation is that there appears to be something morally suspect about someone who never performs these acts. This suggests that the acts we commonly think of as supererogatory may in fact be wide imperfect duties. These are duties to adopt a maxim rather than to perform a particular act and they allow significant freedom to determine whether a principle is relevant to a particular situation and to choose between different ways of satisfying a principle.²³ This argument only works if we think that people are only blameworthy for violating an obligation. However, as Mellema points out, the force of this argument disappears if we accept that there are praiseworthy, morally optional acts that are nevertheless blameworthy to omit.²⁴ If we accept this then the fact that someone may be worthy of criticism for never performing the kind of act we commonly think of as supererogatory does not give us any reason to reject the existence of acts of supererogation.

3 An Neglected Option

In the next two sections I will show that Mellema’s argument is unsuccessful. For the purposes of my argument, I do not intend to say anything against Mellema’s argument for the existence of acts that meet the criteria Mellema gives for Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. Rather, I will show that we can accept that there are acts that fit this description without accepting that this gives us any reason to make room for new deontic categories.

The first step in my argument is to point out that we can accept the existence of acts that meet the description that Mellema gives for Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence, without accepting the need to make room for additional deontic categories. The alternative option is to redefine Supererogation and Offence in light of these arguments. Rather than creating new concepts, we could simply make the existing concepts of Supererogation and Offence more inclusive. The following shows how this could be done.

Supererogation (Revised): An act that is morally optional and praiseworthy to perform.

Offence (Revised): An act that is morally optional and blameworthy to perform.²⁵

These revised definitions retain what is distinctive about supererogation and offence. Although the performance of supererogatory acts is praiseworthy and the performance of offences blameworthy, unlike obligations and prohibitions supererogatory acts are morally optional. The most important point for our purposes, though, is that these definitions are able to accommodate Mellema’s claim that there are acts that meet the criteria given by his definitions of Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence without the need to create new deontic categories. What Mellema’s argument really shows, then, is that we must either make room for two new deontic categories or amend our definitions of supererogation and offence to make them more inclusive. In the next section I will argue that there is good reason to prefer the latter option and to amend our existing categories to make them more inclusive.

4 Evaluating the Options

In the last section we saw that accepting Mellema’s arguments for the existence of acts that meet the criteria that feature in the definitions of Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence does not directly lead to the conclusion that we must make room for these new categories. Rather, it presents us with a choice. We can either make room for these new categories or amend the existing categories. In this section I will argue that there is good reason to widen the existing concepts rather than creating new ones.

The first reason to reform our existing definitions rather than to create new categories is that it is more parsimonious. If we accept that parsimony is a virtue of classificatory schemes then, all else being equal, we have a reason to prefer a more parsimonious scheme to a less parsimonious one.

This, of course, far from settles the matter. The supporter of Quasi-Supererogation is likely to respond that what is lost in parsimony is more than made up for with a more accurate and nuanced classification of the deontic options.²⁶ Moreover, the costs to parsimony are small, as it is only two additional deontic categories that are being called for. Given this, we might be tempted to think that considerations of parsimony provide no reason to reject the creation of new deontic categories.

However, this response downplays the extent of the effects of accepting these new deontic categories on how parsimonious our deontic scheme will be. To see why let’s begin by noting that the way in which The Standard Position is outlined is somewhat misleading. While they capture some of what Mellema takes to characterize the deontic categories, it is worth remembering that this characterization of the deontic field covers only the morally optional. In order to provide a full range of the deootic options we must also investigate the non-optional acts. If we were to outline these in terms of praise and blameworthiness then we would be presented with the following possible options (Table 2):

Table 2 The expanded deontic scheme

If we are committed to creating a new deontic category for every possible combination of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness then there is no reason to only do so in the range of the morally optional. We will also have to do so for each of the unnamed options in the range of the non-optional. If we accept the need to make room for Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence then we would be pressured to make room for these additional categories as well. Of course, as with Mellema’s original schema, not all of these options will be possible for human agents. Perhaps we should rule out the possibility of acts that are praiseworthy to perform and to omit and acts that are blameworthy to perform and omit.²⁷ However, this still creates the need for four additional deontic categories. By making room for Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence, then, we appear to be committed to accepting the existence of a far more unwieldy set of deontic concepts.

Another, more important problem with creating new categories to fill in the blanks in the above table is that doing so would mean that we would no longer be capturing what we mean by obligation and prohibition. It seems uncontroversial to say that while there are times where it is praiseworthy to perform an obligation there are also times where it is not. A firefighter who has to risk her life in the performance of her work may fulfill a duty while performing an incredibly praiseworthy act. On the other hand, someone who repays a loan to a friend on time may also be fulfilling a duty but not in a way that makes him worthy of praise. What this tells us is that if we are to do justice to our everyday concept of moral obligation then moral obligation is going to have to occupy more than one space on the above table. To class only one of these acts as obligatory and the other as quasi-obligatory would artificially limit the scope of moral obligation in a way that runs against our ordinary use of the phrase.

Accepting that moral obligation must occupy more than one space in the table above is in itself a reason to think that supererogation and offence might also occupy multiple spaces. More importantly, though, a similar argument to the above can be run against the need to make room for quasi-supererogation. Supererogation is typically taken to be a technical term that is roughly equivalent to the ordinary language phrase ‘beyond the call of duty’. The starting point of almost all attempts to analyze supererogation is that this word is roughly equivalent to the ordinary language phrase ‘beyond the call of duty’.²⁸ Given that supererogation is taken to be a technical term for this ordinary language phrase, our analysis of the concept should be true to our use of the phrase. Accepting this gives us reason to make our definition of supererogation wide enough to encompass all acts that we would describe as ‘beyond the call of duty’. This, in turn, gives us reason to want our definition of supererogation to cover the acts that meet the criteria that Mellema lays out for Quasi-Supererogation. After all, these are acts that in exceeding what is required by duty are naturally described as being beyond the call of duty. As Mellema himself acknowledges, what the existence of these acts shows is that, “There are occasions in which one can be deserving of blame for failing to go beyond the call of duty.”²⁹ It is natural then to describe these acts as being beyond the call of duty. Having accepted this we now have good reason to want our definition of supererogation to cover these acts. Given that supererogation is a technical term for the phrase ‘beyond the call of duty’, if it is appropriate to use this phrase to describe these acts then, all else being equal, we should want our technical term for this phrase to cover the acts as well. This gives us reason to widen our existing concept of supererogation rather than to create a new concept of Quasi-Supererogation.

If we accept this for supererogation then we have good reason to accept it for offence as well. If we are happy to widen our concept of supererogation to include acts that it is blameworthy to omit then it seems like, if we want a unified set of deontic concepts, we should also widen our concept of offence to include acts that it is praiseworthy to omit. What this shows is that reflecting on what it is that attempts to analyze supererogation are trying to achieve gives us good reason to widen our concept of supererogation and offence rather than to create new categories.

In response it could be claimed that while the above is true it is also true that philosophers working on supererogation have typically seen the omission of supererogatory acts as blameless. By expanding our definition of supererogation, then, we would be going against this well-established view of the supererogatory. We might think, then, that while being true to the attempt to capture the phrase ‘beyond the call of duty’ gives us reason to expand our definition, being true to how many philosophers have understood supererogation provides us with countervailing reason to resist this expansion.

This response, though, ignores an important point about the order of methodological priority. Remember that supererogation is seen as the technical term for the ordinary language phrase ‘beyond the call of duty’. When we are trying to give an analysis of supererogation, then, we are trying to give an analysis of this ordinary language phrase as well. It may well be true that many have accepted that part of what it is for an act to be supererogatory is for it to be blameless to omit. This, though, does not give us reason to stay loyal to this analysis when presented with an act that it beyond the call of duty but blameless to omit. Given that the aim of those providing an analysis of supererogation is to capture what we mean by the ordinary language phrase it is this, rather than a loyalty to previous analyses, that should take priority.

In summary, there are two reasons to opt to reform our definition of Supererogation and Offence rather than create the new category of Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. The first reason is that creating these new categories seems to commit us to creating similar new categories in the non-optional domain. This is to be avoided, as it would lead to an unwieldy set of deontic concepts. The second, more important, reason to reform the existing concepts rather than to create new ones is that this option does justice to our ordinary moral concepts.

5 Implications

If we accept the arguments I have given in the previous section then we should reject Mellema’s conclusion that we need to make room for these additional deontic categories. However, if we accept the initial stages of his argument, where he defended the possibility of acts meeting the criteria he sets out for these new categories then we are now left with an equally interesting conclusion. We should now accept that it is sometimes blameworthy to fail to perform an act of supererogation and praiseworthy to omit an offence.

It is worth noting that this conclusion allows the supporter of supererogation to offer a similar response to the response Mellema gave to the anti-supererogation argument considered in §1. This argument pointed to the fact that there appears to be something morally suspect about someone who never performs any of the acts we commonly think of as supererogatory. If we think that acts of supererogation are never blameworthy to omit then this appears to put pressure on the claim that acts of supererogation exist. However, if we think that acts of supererogation can be blameworthy to omit then this argument loses its force. Those who think that acts of supererogation exist can now respond to this argument by saying that the reason that an agent who never performs the kinds of act we think of as supererogatory can be worthy of moral censure is that it can sometimes be blameworthy to omit an act of supererogation.

6 Conclusion

In this paper I have investigated Mellema’s argument in support of the claim that we need to make room for two new deontic categories, Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence. I argued that Mellema’s argument in support of his claim that acts meets the criteria he offers for these two categories at best provides support for a disjunctive conclusion. Either we make room for these additional categories or we reject the claim that no supererogatory acts are blameworthy to omit and no offences praiseworthy to omit. I then argued that we have good reason to prefer the latter option. The first reason is that the alternative would create an unwieldy set of deontic concepts. Second, and more importantly, only this option allows us to do justice to our ordinary moral concepts. There is, then, no good reason to make room for Quasi-Supererogation and Quasi-Offence in our set of deontic concepts.³⁰