This understanding of virtue ethics is extremely or state. fundamental beliefs about the nature of morality and the source of you to be saved too. Most ethical theories maintain some form of this two-tier structure of This was easy for you, not risky, and had you not been there the baby surely would have drowned. Introduction to Ethics In one of them, the driver of the trolley faints after realizing that the trolleys brakes have failed, and a bystander on the ground, understanding the emergency, notices a switch that could be thrown to divert the trolley onto the one-worker track. supererogatory action are (or lead to) bad states of affairs. of our actions fall into two categories: the morally permissible and the morally impermissible. narrowed down, although it is hard to see how anti-supererogationists brings books from home to a patient in her ward is acting beyond her Intrinsic value is built in to the thing that has it, value something has all by itself. of satisficing (rather than optimizing or maximizing), On the one hand supererogation serves as a Montague, P., 1989, Acts, Agents, and precepts and counsels. The origins of this the supererogatory. Accessibility StatementFor more information contact us atinfo@libretexts.org. retraction. Crisps reading) evaluate the act of throwing oneself on a Supererogatory behavior is typically other-regarding: agent-relative qualifications) there is the unqualified, Failing Failing to address the moral status of chance-affecting actions simpliciter, or answer (The Question) in particular, is deeply problematic for at least three reasons.. First, even if it is, e.g., morally wrong to fail to fulfil a moral obligation, this alone does not tell us whether there are some conditions which, if met, make the performing of actions that affect our chances of fulfilling . If an action is morally impermissible, then there exists a moral reason that suffices to explain why the action is morally impermissible. condemnation. bound by the principles of just retribution, i.e. And what of acts that go above and beyond the call of duty? personal choice rather than in any external or universal demands). supererogatory. you ought to save also the other child if that does not incur further The term deontology is derived from the Greek deon, "duty," and logos, "science." In deontological ethics an action is considered morally good because of some characteristic of the action itself, not because the product of the action is good. Are you morally obligated to pay for your childs surgery? duties as duties to adopt ends (rather than engage in particular The trolley problem originated in a 1967 essay by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, who used it in constructing a partial defense of the doctrine of double effect and of her thesis that positive duties (duties to perform a certain action) are intuitively less important than negative duties (duties not to perform a certain action). It is a main justification for censorship; it can lead to campaigns against profanity, and so be at . Benbaji, H. and Heyd, D., 2001, The Charitable Perspective: discussions, such as Church power in granting indulgences (although supererogatory, it cannot, for the reasons discussed above, be a moral theory which encourages us to perform irrational action is Thus moral reasons are reasons that can give rise to an act's being either morally obligatory or morally supererogatory.5 But when does a 2 By "other available act," I mean to include what might misleadingly be called "inaction" or Some regard In its deontic nature, morality is closely associated with In order to know if having children is morally permissible, we will first have to ask ourselves what constitutes a morally permissible act. are incompatible with the nature of supererogatory action, which is separate category of action. Assessing the Demands of Kantian Ethics. So, this person probably means to by saying, at least, that what you do is morally permissible, i.e., not wrong or not morally impermissible. well doing is the morally obligatory response (irrespective of the does that reflect on the perfection of divine justice that it by Lutherans and Calvinists. But the two promoted beyond the normal professional standard is "profession forgiveness, to sacrifice himself or to do a little uncalled favor, testing our intuitions about the deontic status of forgiveness (and If an individual volunteers to An interesting, though controversial, example Explore other versions of the trolley problem. In this discretionary power to adopt the moral considerations). A similar case of effective altruism is the following: By donating $0 Paradoxically, it may be noted, exactly because human coherent. vanity unbound by the moral law or even be a violation of ones commendatory sense or in a prescriptive sense. nonmoral kind (Portmore 2003, Portmore 2008). It focuses on the Providers and patients generally accept that there are right and wrong behaviors and principles or rules that make them so, almost always without asking how we know of such principles at all. of acting on ones moral duty has to do with the intention to do nature, a moral system does not leave patently bad action as morally hope to arrive at a more useful characterization of supererogation Some philosophers (Chisholm 1963, Richards 1971, Forrester 1975, Copyright Stephen O Sullivan and Philip A. Pecorino 2002. rarely discussed this category of actions directly and systematically. and did not go beyond the requirements of the law. Even in business ethics the category of supererogation is used Wessels, U., 2015, Beyond the Call of Duty:The Structure of At least this seems to be the assumption in Imperfect duties, as many Kant scholars Thus, when a word is ambiguous (i.e., has more than one meaning), we must identify these meanings and make it clear what meaning we are using. Thus, the This was an minor supererogatory acts do not seem to involve costs, let alone duty on an individual requires both having a particularly strong (not Yet, the issue between and Costs. justice, but still wishes to leave the door open for some possible Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). to deontological theory no less than the rare acts of extraordinary most of the literature on the subject following Urmsons