Abstract
It is widely accepted that morality does not demand that we do our very best, but our most significant moral traditions do not easily accommodate this intuition. I will argue that the underlying problem is not specific to any particular tradition. Rather, it will be difficult for any moral theory to account for binary moral concepts like permissible/impermissible while also accounting for scalar moral concepts like better/worse. If only the best is considered permissible, morality will seem either unreasonably demanding or implausibly minimal. But if we draw a line of duty below the optimal, then we must explain how the act that is worse is nonetheless permissible. Some have tried to explain this by appealing to non-moral considerations, and others have appealed to agent-relative moral considerations. I argue that no such approach will work. We should instead exploit the distinction between reasons for performing an act and reasons for holding someone accountable for an act’s performance. This approach will also help to clear up a confusion regarding the notion of a moral demand.
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Notes
See, for example, Heyd (1982).
See also Norcross (1997) in which he rejects the notion of a line between good and bad actions.
Norcross suggests at one point that viewing utilitarianism this way (as simply about better/worse and not about obligation/duty/demands) allows the utilitarian to capture the idea of supererogation since the better act is not demanded. But he later notes correctly that the problem supererogation presents utilitarianism is not simply the demandingness objection. It is not enough to show that the better act is not demanded, but rather, one needs to show how the worse act, when it is a supererogatory omission, is permissible in a way that some morally worse acts are not. Supererogation makes sense only in company with obligation. Thus, in rejecting the line of duty altogether, Norcross’ view rejects the supererogatory as well.
See also (Baron 1995, chap. 1).
One thing to note is that Kant seems to consider the super-meritorious as consisting of the particularly heroic. As I’ll argue, this is too narrow a view of the supererogatory. Supererogatory acts need not involve heroic self-sacrifice or grave risk.
See, for example, Raz (1975) and Hurley (1995). I do not, however, believe any of these proposals will work. One general feature of these accounts (as well as the accounts I will consider below) is that they take the challenge to be explaining why apparently undefeated reasons do not, in certain cases, amount to requirements. In Sects. 3 and 4, I will argue that reasons themselves just don’t add up to coercive requirements in any case. In a way, then, the trick is to say why some acts are obligatory (where do the requirements come from).
See also Norcross (2005b).
Reuben Stern makes a related point in a discussion of legal responsibility and contextualist accounts of freedom of the will (Stern 2011).
Wolf’s emphasis on the personal interests that shape an individual‘s identity is similar in some ways to Bernard Williams’ emphasis on personal commitments. See, in particular, Williams (1973).
This example comes from Dreier (2004).
Because Dancy does not want to repeat the mistake that Wolf makes, he is careful to state that both sorts of value (neutral and agent-relative) are forms of moral value (1993, p. 139).
Indeed the term Slote uses, ‘satisficing,’ originated with certain economists who noted the instrumental value of a satisficing strategy. See, for example, Simon (1955, 1959). See also Parfit (1984, pp. 13–16). Parfit describes cases in which a typically valuable disposition leads to a less than fully rational act as “rationally irrational.” See also Slote’s more recent discussion of the connection between satisficing and virtuous moderation in Slote (2004).
See also Schmidtz (2004). We may also see these kinds of cases as often involving decision-making where a clear preference ordering is not available to the agent. Thus the offer that is good enough is not so because it is high enough on a satisfaction index but perhaps because it well enough meets a variety of aims (to sell the house for more than it cost him, to make enough money to buy a new house, etc). Where the options that meet these aims are ordered according to preference, it still seems one should optimize among them (Richardson 2004, pp. 117–119).
I should add that I think there are good reasons to doubt the usefulness of this enticing/requiring distinction more generally. Exploring those reasons would take us beyond the scope of this paper. but see, e.g., Raz (1999).
See Dancy (2004, p. 99). The account Dancy does offer of supererogation was discussed above.
In this respect, the language of enticing or recommending reasons is better than that of justifying reasons.
Norcross also makes note of it in (2006).
Credit is due to Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla for this example.
It is important to stress that holdings accountable can be first personal. We can make demands of ourselves and have punitive reactive attitudes like guilt and moral shame.
For Scanlon, this is part of the explanation for why certain moral principles could not reasonably be rejected, and an act is wrong if it is proscribed by a principle that no one could reasonably reject. In addition to playing a role in Scanlon’s contractualist project, considerations like this would also clearly play a role in a rule-utilitarian approach to justifying moral limits. They also seem relevant to a Kantian insofar as they bear on the question of whether such maxims of action could be rationally willed as a universal law. Consider, in particular, Kant’s fourth example of the universal law formula of the categorical imperative in which a prosperous man is deciding whether it is permissible for the prosperous to not contribute anything to those in distress. One cannot consistently will this as a universal law because “a will that decided this would conflict with itself, since many cases could occur in which one would need the love and sympathy of others, and in which, by such a law of nature arisen from his own will, he would rob himself of all hope of the assistance he wishes for himself… (Kant 1785, 1997, p. 33)”.
And probably norms against other forms of personal harms like theft and defamation.
Some of which may be expressed by taking on certain roles.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper, I would like to thank Zac Cogley, Roger Crisp, Mark Lance, Mark Murphy, Henry Richardson, Douglas Portmore, an anonymous reviewer from this journal, and audiences at Creighton University, Spring Hill College, and the 2009 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress.
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Ferry, M. Does morality demand our very best? On moral prescriptions and the line of duty. Philos Stud 165, 573–589 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9968-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9968-6