Must we be perfect?: A case against supererogation

ABSTRACT

In this paper we offer an argument against supererogation and in favour of moral perfectionism. We argue three primary points: (1) That the putative moral category is not generated by any of the main normative ethical systems, and it is difficult to find space for it in these systems at all; (2) That the primary support for supererogation is based on intuitions, which can be undercut by various other pieces of evidence; and (3) That there are better reasons to favour perfectionism, including competing intuitions about the good-ought tie-up, and the epistemic preference for theoretical simplicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Supererogation
• perfectionism
• normative ethics
• parsimony
• reasons
• intuitions

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to an anonymous referee for Inquiry for their very helpful suggestions that significantly improved this paper. Additionally, we would like to extend special thanks to Frank Cabrera, Alexander Jech, Rebecca Stangl, Robert Streiffer, Kyle Blanchette, Josh Parikh, and Joseph Jedwab for reading and commenting on (in some cases, several) drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We do not think it is possible to offer a comprehensive defence of our position in one paper. We appreciate, therefore, that some important objections to our thesis will inevitably go unanswered. It is our hope that we will not be misinterpreted as being unduly lenient on our own thesis. We have tried to identify the best arguments and objections for presentation here, with the hope of responding to further worthwhile objections at a later date.

2 There are many uses of the term ‘perfectionism’ in philosophy – we use the term as stated above. Of course, one may agree that it is impossible to act supererogatorily, but disagree that we ought to be perfect, given something like moral nihilism. Therefore, a general ‘ought’ to be perfect would follow from our argument only if moral nihilism is false.

3 ‘Some, like von Herbert, believe that Kant's ethics asks too little, requiring only minimal decency and saying nothing about the “higher flights of morality.” Others, reading the texts differently, believe that his theory asks too much, demanding total devotion to morality and treating everything worth doing (and perhaps more) as a duty. But, despite their differences, the two sets of critics concur in taking the central problem to be Kant's failure to recognize the category of the supererogatory’.

4 ‘There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will’. (Emboldened text our own). Kant (2002, 393).

5 Famously, Moore (1948).

6 J.S. Mill (1865, 143) does recognise a distinction between obligatory actions and non-obligatory meritorious actions in Auguste Comte and Positivism; however, he does not explain how this would fit into a utilitarian framework, and indeed Mill's utilitarianism is notorious for being (at best) at the fringes of what would today be labeled ‘utilitarianism’.

7 The reason for Heyd's difficulty was that the picture of the world assumed by virtue theories did not map on directly to the liberal conception of the post-enlightenment world from whence ideas of supererogation arose.

8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1985), 1106b, 29ff., quoted in Stangl (2016, 351–52).

9 To avoid mischaracterizing Heyd, we note that this quote does not describe his own view ( in his book Supererogation (1982) he defends a supererogationist framework) but rather the view of someone who holds to the good-ought tie-up.

10 In comments on an earlier draft of this paper given at the Logos Workshop, University of Notre Dame, 2016.

11 In any case, why think that we are not always blameworthy? Maybe we are just really, really bad. We wish to leave this position open.

12 E.g. Street (2006).

13 This has, in fact, been documented. See Hoorens (1995).

14 To be clear, we are not claiming that these experimental results are impossible – or even difficult – to explain on supererogationism. We only suggest that they undercut the force of the objection to perfectionism that we’re not so bad – humans are notoriously prone to overestimating their goodness.

15 See, for example, Miller (2016).

16 See McNamara (1996) for an illustration of this point: his very sophisticated analysis of the structure and interrelationships of moral concepts is in part reflective of the multiplicity of concepts he needs to incorporate the supererogatory.

17 This allows us to respond to the following objection: is the omission of a best action not a failure of obligation? We propose that this omission is simply morally indeterminate, as are many other under-described actions (like the action of removing someone's appendix, which is sometimes good but in most scenarios fairly perverse).

18 This is not to say that consequences are irrelevant, or that we should not at all aim for efficiency in our charitable giving.