Abstract
A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when (and why) an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory.
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Notes
The term ‘optional’ is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any permissible act, which would include morally required acts; however, following Paul McNamara’s terminology (1996), I reserve the term ‘optional’ for those actions that are neither morally forbidden nor morally required. Of course, the moral landscape may not be this straightforward. Some acts like those of moral decency may well “occupy a shadowy territory between the obligatory and the supererogatory” (Calhoun 2004, 130). Nevertheless, we must first establish what it is to go beyond duty before we tackle what it is, for example, to go beyond decency.
Or, perhaps more precisely, morally better than some permissible alternative.
This term is from Feinberg (1961, 281).
Mellema discusses a similar attempt at formulating the optionality of supererogatory actions in terms of act types (1991a, 31–32).
For a similar argument, see Mellema (1991b, 169).
It might be thought that we can avoid the problem discussed above if we can give a list of act types that are optional to exemplify, just as we might be able to give a list of act types that it is obligatory to exemplify. Thus ‘running into a burning building to save a child’ is an optional act type, as is perhaps ‘donating blood’, ‘giving a gift’ and so on. However, it is implausible to think that such a list can be given that would accommodate the diversity of acts that are and could be supererogatory and that would also allow for the fact that sometimes acts of those types may well be forbidden or required.
If it didn’t, then I would still owe you £100. But imagine our response to someone who, promised £100 and having received £200, demanded a further £100!
It might be thought that we have, rather, fulfilled our obligation in a way that was not required. However, as pointed out earlier, we always fulfil our obligations in ways that are not required (for example by fulfilling our promise on a Tuesday); therefore, this does not distinguish the mere fulfilment of our duty with those that go beyond the mere fulfilment.
McNamara makes a similar distinction between the supererogatory and what he calls ‘doing the minimum morality demands’ (1996, 426). However, he does not say explicitly what this distinction ought to be based on. I give an account here that does.
When more than one action involves the least cost, the bare minimum is constituted by more than one act. Suppose that I could either watch TV or have a nap and both involve the least cost to me of all the permissible actions available to me; then, both actions would constitute doing the bare minimum. Often multiple tokens of the same type can involve the same amount of cost to perform: both watching TV and having a nap might be tokens of the type ‘staying at home in my pyjamas’. However, some tokens may be much more costly than other tokens of the same type (for example, missing a hospital appointment may also be a token of the type ‘staying at home in my pyjamas’).
My proposal is similar to that made by Feinberg, who claims that a person ‘exceeds’ duties in terms of the amount of sacrifice undertaken (1961, 280). However, I do not believe that the cost involved in performing supererogatory acts has to amount to ‘sacrifice’ (as I discuss further in Sect. 4) and I disagree that there need to be two types of supererogatory act: ‘oversubscription’ and ‘non-duty’. The notion of the bare minimum is missing from Feinberg’s account, a feature that would unify these two supposedly disparate types of supererogatory acts.
Note that a small refinement of the notion of cost is made in Sect. 5.4.
Note that on my account, optionality is an attribute of actions. This follows a general trend of thinking that being supererogatory is a property of actions rather than agents. It is true that the costliness of an act can only be determined in relation to an agent, as it only an agent who can bear the cost. However, it is not particularly controversial to think that determining whether or not an act is supererogatory needs to appeal to some qualities of the agent. Many accounts of supererogation, including those that are actively hostile to the idea that features of the agent like praiseworthiness should be taken into account, still allow that, for example, the agent’s intentions or the permissible alternatives available to her are an important part of determining whether an act is supererogatory (see, for example, Heyd 1982; Montague 1989; Archer 2013). Thus, I do not believe that taking into account the costliness of an act undermines supererogation—and optionality—being understood as attributions of an act.
Thus, on these particular accounts, no account of optionality is actually given. If cost is not included in the notion of optionality itself, then ‘optional’ simply means ‘permissible’.
For Jacobs, supererogatory actions would be our duty but for the fact that “they are too costly to be required” (1987, 97).
For example, Portmore argues that were it not for the sacrifice involved in saving a child from a burning building, “attempting the rescue would be obligatory rather than supererogatory” (2003, 315).
Given the explanatory role that cost has played in many accounts of supererogation, it is tempting to think (as I am sure some do) that we are morally required to do what is morally better if there is no extra cost to the agent in doing so. If you accept this principle, then it will indeed turn out that morally better acts are necessarily more costly. In which case, morally better acts will necessarily be optional (on my account of optionality). However, it is important to note that this principle is not uncontroversial. As I explain in the following sub-section, we might think that certain considerations establish our obligations without being directly responsive to how costly a particular course of action is.
For example, I argue elsewhere that room for the supererogatory can arise as ‘spandrels’ from other commitments not directly concerned with extreme cost (Benn 2017).
An alternative to reducing optionality to goodness might be to try to abandon optionality entirely and define supererogation solely in terms of goodness (or betterness). However, no account of supererogation denies the centrality of the optionality of supererogatory acts. The only good reason to reject a core feature at the heart of all accounts of supererogation would be that a coherent account of optionality could not be given, but this is exactly what I have done. Finally, the notion of optionality is important because it allows for the possibility of optional bad actions. The possibility of such acts provides the basis of the moral mirror of the supererogatory: the suberogatory. Suberogatory actions are bad and yet permissible. Suppose supererogatory actions are characterised as morally permissible acts that are morally better than a permissible alternative (thus, dropping the notion of optionality altogether). This would mean that all permissible acts except the least good permissible act would be supererogatory. Not only is this an extremely inclusive account of the supererogatory, it leaves little or no room left for the suberogatory. It is an advantage of my account of optionality that it makes room for suberogation.
Paraphrased from Horgan and Timmons (2010, 47).
Mellema does not use the term ‘oversubscription’ but he does discuss cases where an act “both fulfils a duty and goes beyond the fulfilment of a duty” (1991b, 172).
As I hope to explore in later work, I believe it would be suberogatory to put the ticket in the bin.
Note that on my account just because an action is not optional does not mean it is required.
You might even experience psychological distress if you didn’t help when you knew you could.
Archer expresses this as a concern that more morally developed persons would experience fewer opportunities to supererogate because they would be under increased obligations [for more, see Archer’s discussion of what he calls the No Cost Principle (2016, 342)]. However, it is important to note that this need not be the issue. I do not assume that something that is no more costly and yet worse than another action needs to be forbidden. It could, rather, simply be bad. Or not. Nevertheless, I accept that if we cannot draw a distinction between the concert and the soup kitchen, then it would lead to fewer opportunities to supererogate.
Alternatively, we could appeal to Calhoun’s notion of a ‘minimally morally good person’ who is someone who has the most basic concern for others needed to do their duty but nothing more (2004). Thus, we could ask of the person who performed the action in question: if I were like them in my non-moral preferences (such as my favourite band or whether I like football) but was a minimally morally good person, would this action be costly to me? Those costs we all associate with supererogatory actions, which excludes the satisfaction they might get from doing good.
It should be noted that the ‘moral pleasure’ I wish to exclude need not be felt as an explicitly moral pleasure by the agent. It is the pleasure gained from those parts of an action in virtue of which the act is morally good. Thus, what makes gift giving morally good is, for example, that it demonstrates caring for others, anticipation of their needs and understanding of their interests. The pleasure we get from these elements can be excluded, even if it not experienced as a distinctively moral pleasure. On the other hand, if someone gets pleasure from helping at a soup kitchen only because it is the only occasion on which they can hang out with their friends who also work there, this pleasure can be included in determining how costly the act is. It is of course true that helping in the soup kitchen is morally better than actions that the agent could otherwise have done (such as stay at home, bored and lonely). However, as discussed in Sect. 5.1, neither supererogation nor optionality should be cashed out as moral goodness (or betterness).
For example, self-sacrifice was thought to be a challenge to the idea of natural selection (Darwin 1871, 163). The solution has been to see self-sacrifice as actually benefiting the person sacrificing through, for example, the preservation of the genes of their offspring.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Rae Langton, Hallvard Lillehammer, Douglas Portmore, Georgie Statham, Tristan Hore, Christine Fears, Shyane Siriwardena, Christina Cameron, Silvia Jonas, Sharon Berry, Olla Solomyak and an anonymous reviewer; also audiences at the University of Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, the Hebrew University Faculty of Philosophy Colloquium, the Centre for Ethical and Political Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study, and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics (CAPE), Kyoto University Japan.
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Benn, C. Supererogation, optionality and cost. Philos Stud 175, 2399–2417 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0965-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0965-7