Abstract
Apparent analogues of moral supererogation can be found in other normative domains, such as the prudential domain and the epistemic domain. Vindicating moral supererogation requires a convincing response to the challenge of the ‘paradox of moral supererogation’: if some act would be morally best, why would it not be morally required? Vindicating putative non-moral types of supererogation requires responding to analogous challenges: if some act would be best by the lights of some normative domain, why would it not be required by the lights of that domain’s standards? I argue that the key to responding to such challenges involves giving a substantive account of what requirement is within the domain in question. The most promising type of account, I suggest, is what I call the Critical Reaction Account.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I use ‘requirement’, ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’ interchangeably.
- 2.
Though see Pummer (2016) for a class of cases where there may be some temptation to dispute this.
- 3.
Note that one doesn’t have a duty to do B1 here, since if one did B2 instead, one wouldn’t have violated any duty by failing to do B1. So the duty is the disjunctive one to do B1 or B2. There are other cases, of course, where one has a duty to perform some specific act, and where some further, supplementary act is supererogatory. For instance, the Good Samaritan may fulfill a duty to provide immediate assistance to the person in need, before performing the supererogatory act of paying the innkeeper for further care.
- 4.
See Archer 2016 for argument for this conclusion.
- 5.
- 6.
Hills discusses the case of Fitzgerald in unpublished work.
- 7.
An interesting case is that of purported aesthetic obligations. Alfred Archer and Lauren Ware (2017) endorse the sanctions approach to obligations. They postulate a distinctive critical reaction they call aesthetic blame which picks out the force of aesthetic musts.
- 8.
I omit ‘ought’ from this list of strong deontic terms. While it is sometimes used as the verb form of obligation (which is a strong deontic term), it (as well as ‘should’) is sometimes used instead to articulate a weaker claim about what there’s strongest reason to do. To say that someone has strongest reason to do X is not to make a strong deontic claim: it does not have must-y force, and does not implicate any punchy critical reaction for failure to comply.
- 9.
I presented some of the material discussed here to philosophy colleagues at the University of Southampton at a Departmental Research Day and at meeting of our Normativity Group. I’m grateful to the attendees for very helpful discussion. I’d also like to thank Alfred Archer, Jonathan Way, and David Heyd for very useful feedback on a draft of this chapter.
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McElwee, B. (2023). Going Above and Beyond: Non-moral Analogues of Moral Supererogation. In: Heyd, D. (eds) Handbook of Supererogation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3633-5_15
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