Michael Ferry
DRAFT
Does Morality Demand Our Very Best?
On Moral Prescriptions and the Line of Duty
There are many examples of acts that seem to go beyond the demands of morality,
acts that philosophers call ‘supererogatory.’ Some of these involve taking extraordinary
risks or making profound sacrifices. Consider the case of Wes Autrey who jumped onto
the New York City Subway tracks in order to save a man who had fallen in front of an
oncoming train. Acts like these are exceptional of course, but they are hardly unheard of.
Moreover, there are a great many less dramatic examples of people doing good beyond
what duty requires, examples like shoveling a neighbor’s walk or cooking a meal for a
friend who’s going through a tough time.
Of course, proclaiming one’s own conduct beyond the call of duty is something of
a social faux pas (‘I really did not have to do that, how extraordinary!’). And so it is not
uncommon for the agent herself to deny in these cases that she has done anything more
than was her duty (Wes Autrey, for example, said: “I don’t feel like I did something
spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.”i). But
these protestations are usually thought the result of humility overwhelming honesty; we
do not take them at face value. The belief remains that these acts go beyond duty, that
one can do more than morality demands.
But despite the strength of this intuition, it is not easily accounted for within our
major moral theories.ii Others have noted the difficulties of squaring supererogation with
the particular claims made, for example, by Kantians or utilitarians.iii I will argue that the
challenges faced by these particular theories ride atop a deeper problem for moral
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theorists, a challenge that any moral theory will need to confront. This is the challenge of
accounting for both the binary and the scalar elements of our moral discourse.iv That is,
it is difficult for a moral theory to account (plausibly) for either/or concepts like
permissible and impermissible on the one hand while also accounting for degreed
concepts like better and worse on the other. But supererogation – where the
supererogatory act is better than the minimally permissible act – involves both of these
sets of concepts. The difficulty this raises for moral theory is clear if we look at the
Kantian and utilitarian traditions. Kant gives us an account of duty but no clear grounds
for assessing an act as better than what duty requires. Utilitarians give us an account of
acts as better and worse but no clear grounds for saying an act is permissible though less
than the best.
The utilitarian assesses acts by reference to the goodness of their consequences,
and a standard utilitarian account of right action claims that an act is right if and only if
its (expected) consequences are at least as good as those of its alternatives. But then
nothing less than the best will do, and if we draw the line of duty at the point of optimal
goodness, what results is obviously an extremely demanding morality. Indeed, it may be
so demanding as to make our binary moral concepts of little actual use. It is certainly
plausible to think that almost none of our actual acts were the very best available. Or at
least it seems we could have little confidence that they were. If so, an optimizing account
of permissibility will make the distinction between permissible and impermissible of little
use in our moral assessments.
In fact, Alastair Norcross has argued that utilitarians should simply claim that
there is no sharp distinction between right and wrong. They should, he claims, embrace
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the notion that rightness, like goodness, is a scalar concept, that acts can be more and less
right and that there is no line at which an act goes from right to wrong. For whatever line
we might try to draw, the utilitarian will be just as concerned about increases in goodness
above the line or below the line as he will about increases in goodness from below to
above the line. As a result, Norcross argues that utilitarians should “reject the claim that
duties or obligations constitute any part of fundamental morality.”v He writes that
“consequentialist theories such as utilitarianism are best understood purely as theories of
the comparative value of alternative actions, not as theories of right and wrong that
demand, forbid, or permit the performance of certain actions.”vi And so the utilitarian
does not offer an account of permissible and impermissible to go along with his account
of better and worse, and so the utilitarian will not be able to account for supererogation.vii
Kant’s view has, in a way, the opposite shortcoming. Kant provides an account of
a line of duty but no grounds for judging acts as better and worse above that line. Of
course, Kant claims that an act has moral worth only if done from duty, and so it would
seem that there can be no morally good action beyond duty. But even if we were to set
this claim aside, Kant’s theory simply provides no grounds from which we might assess
an act as better than duty. Kant’s moral law places a constraint, or a limiting condition,
on our pursuit of our aims. The Categorical Imperative offers a test for an action’s
permissibility, and our duty is determined by reference to this moral law. But an act will
either pass or fail the test the Categorical Imperative provides - the maxim is
universalizable, or it isn’t; the act involves treating someone merely as a means, or it does
not. Of course we may say that the impermissible are generally worse than the
permissible, but this will not capture the sense in which goodness is a matter of degree.
4
Thomas Hill has suggested that Kant might account for the idea that we can do
better than duty requires by appealing to the concept of an imperfect duty and to the
concept of a wide imperfect duty, in particular.viii Imperfect duties, in general, allow
more latitude in how they are carried out than do perfect duties. For instance, while basic
respect for others may always be required, there will usually be a great many ways to
satisfy this requirement. Wide imperfect duties allow more latitude not just in how they
are carried out but in when they are carried out as well. For instance, the requirement that
one adopt the maxim of beneficence is consistent with our frequently omitting possible
beneficent acts as long as we perform enough such acts on other occasions. Kant denies,
however, that once we have done enough to satisfy the imperfect duty, we could still do
better. But if so, then adopting the maxim of beneficence will be either unreasonably
demanding or implausibly minimalist. That is, either we accept that doing enough will
involve doing all the good it seems we could do, or we deny that it would actually be
better to go beyond some reasonable minimum.
There is good reason to think that Kant endorsed this minimalist position. While
Kant certainly did not believe that we do our best by promoting the best consequences, he
may well have shared with the utilitarian the intuition that we have a duty to do our very
best. In the Doctrine of Virtue, for example, he claims that “the first command of all
duties to oneself” is to “know yourself… in terms of your moral perfection.”ix We are
under a duty to perfect ourselves as moral agents. But duty doesn’t involve performing
so-called super-meritorious acts only because Kant denies that they are actually better.
For Kant, it is not okay to do less than the best, but the best involves less than one might
think.
5
Kant was well aware of the common notion that there are acts that go beyond
duty, but he was not impressed by it. In the Critique of Practical Reason, he writes, “I
wish they [educators] would spare them [students] examples of so-called noble (supermeritorious) actions… and would refer everything to duty only…”x Kant is here making
a point about moral instruction. He claims that examples of the super-meritorious lead
students to flights of moral fancy and self-righteousness and that such students will be
prone to “release themselves from observing common and everyday responsibilities as
petty and insignificant.”xi But Kant’s concern is not merely for good moral pedagogy.
Of the drive to be especially noble, Kant claims that even “among the instructed and
experienced portion of mankind, this supposed drive has, if not an injurious, at least no
genuine moral, effect on the heart…”xii We should “attend not so much to the elevation
of the soul… as to the subjection of the heart to duty”.xiii
So Kant’s theory provides an account of permissible and impermissible but no
obvious account of better and worse. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, provides an
account of better and worse but may give us no useful account of permissible and
impermissible. This is not to suggest that no account of better and worse is possible in a
generally Kantian framework or that no account of permissible and impermissible is
possible in a generally utilitarian framework. But providing such accounts is not easy.
As we’ve just seen, if we claim that only the best is permissible, then ‘permissible’ and
‘impermissible’ will be of little use in distinguishing between our various actions since it
is quite possible that they are (almost) all impermissible. But if we draw the line of duty
below the optimal, then we face the challenge of explaining how the act that is worse is
nonetheless permissible since it appears we have good (sometimes quite weighty) reason
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to prefer the act that is better. That is, doing what is worse appears to involve a moral
(and rational) failing. And it may well be this underlying problem that drives both Kant
and the utilitarian to deny that one can exceed morality’s demands. But put this way, the
problem is not unique to utilitarianism or Kantianism. It is a structural problem that faces
any attempt to account for the notion that we can do better than morality demands.
2. Some Potential Solutions
Though I do not have the space to consider many of the proposed solutions to this
problem,xiv I will discuss two models that may be thought to resolve the problem and that
are, I think, representative of certain broad approaches that one might take. In doing so, I
hope to motivate the idea that a very different kind of solution may be required.
Appeal to Non-Moral Reasons
Susan Wolf considers the idea of a moral perfectionist, or a moral saint, and she
argues that “such a being would be unattractive.”xv Given the great many opportunities
that we have in life to display moral virtues, Wolf fears that any serious attempt at moral
perfectionism would require an agent to develop moral virtues such that they would
crowd out non-moral virtues and that it would lead an agent to spend so much time
performing moral acts that there would be little or no time left for engaging in other
worthwhile endeavors. As a result, a moral perfectionist would be unlikely, according to
Wolf, to have a “healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character.”xvi She claims that
the desire to be as morally good as possible could be all consuming in a way that would
threaten “the existence of an identifiable, personal self.”xvii Wolf is not arguing against
any moral theory but rather against the idea that it is always most appropriate to fully
7
satisfy the demands of morality (whatever they may be). Her point is not that we have
the wrong moral ideals but rather that we need to recognize that they are not our only
ideals and that it is both desirable and appropriate to give a significant regard to nonmoral ideals as well.
Though Wolf suggests that accepting her conclusion means accepting that “any
plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation,”xviii there is
reason to think that supererogation may be a separate issue altogether. Wolf claims that
sometimes non-moral considerations make it appropriate to not act on the weight of
moral reasons, but she does not claim that such a failure to act on the weight of moral
reasons is appropriate because it is morally permissible. She doesn’t argue that it is
morally permissible to not be as morally good as one can be but rather that it is not
“particularly rational or good or desirable” for one to be that morally good. This does
not provide a framework for an account of supererogation. If she is right, then there is a
sense of the word ‘ought’ that attaches to the normativity of reasons generally (including
non-moral reasons) such that there are occasions on which what one ought to do,
generally speaking, is not what one ought to do, morally speaking. This is certainly an
interesting claim. However, we are still left with the question of whether it is ever
morally permissible to not do what it would be morally best to do.
Even if we accept that non-moral reasons can change the moral status of an act that they can make an act morally permissible despite the moral reasons that tell against
it, we are left with serious problems.xix First, it is not clear that we could, on this model,
properly limit the scope of the permissibly sub-optimal. While it does seem in some
cases that the costs of the morally optimal act make it permissible to omit the act, the
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costs do not seem to have that effect in other cases. Consider the costs associated with
not stealing things. Even if I would really like a sweater, it still does not seem
permissible for me to swipe it.xx Thus if we allow non-moral reasons to override moral
reasons, we would need to explain why they can override some but not others. Second,
the appeal to non-moral reasons will only be plausible in cases where there are strong
non-moral reasons to omit the morally better act. But it is just not the case that all (or
even most) supererogatory acts involve significant costs to the agent. Consider the
example of buying a book for a friend. Suppose it’s on sale, and you think your friend
will enjoy it. It may be morally better to buy it than not, but it is the nature of such favors
that they are not obligatory. Such acts do not involve significant sacrifice and may even
be in the interest of the acting agent if the joys of giving outweigh the costs. But if the
non-moral reasons and the moral reasons both favor giving (or even if the non-moral
reasons are just not strong enough to override), then on the view we are considering, the
agent would be morally required to do so.
Appeal to Moral Reasons
Jonathan Dancy argues that an act, in addition to its neutral value (“the value
derived from the difference it will make to the world that this action was done”),xxi also
has an agent-relative value that is generated by the sacrifice incurred (or presumably the
benefits gained) by the acting agent. Of course, the costs to the agent, as one person that
will be affected by the act, will already be accounted for in the act’s neutral value, but
Dancy claims that the costs to the agent can, in some sense, be counted twice. The cost
to the agent contributes to the moral value of the act considered neutrally, and it also
9
contributes to the moral value of the act when considered from the perspective of the
acting agent.xxii
But how does this relate to the problem of accounting for supererogation?
Consider the example of a soldier who might jump on a grenade in order to save two
others. That the soldier will lose his life will contribute negatively to the neutral value
that the act has. However, this negative contribution will (other things equal) be
outweighed by the positive contribution resulting from the fact that two other soldiers
will survive when they otherwise would not have. Thus, agent-neutral reasons will likely
favor the act. But Dancy’s picture requires us to consider the agent’s loss, not simply as
a loss in the calculation of neutral values, but also as a loss to the agent. That is, we must
also, according to Dancy, consider the agent-relative reasons involved, and it may turn
out that the agent’s reasons, all told, do not recommend the act, although his reasons
rooted in the neutral value of the act do recommend it. Thus, it is at least plausible that
the agent will have more moral reason to run for cover than to jump on the grenade. If
this is the case, then running for cover will certainly be a permissible option. However,
as Dancy himself is well aware, this way of looking at the situation may go too far in that
it now appears as though the soldier ought to run for cover. xxiii
Dancy claims that this problem can be dealt with because, although the costs to
the agent lead to moral reasons, the agent can simply discount the costs to himself since it
is he that will have to pay them. This is so despite the fact that those costs are moral
costs and that agent-relative values are moral values. As Dancy notes, it is important to
his account that the costs involved generate a moral reason so that agent-relative costs
give rise to a genuine permission and not simply an “excuse for the faint-hearted.”xxiv
10
On the model that Dancy gives us then, the soldier has more moral reason to run for
cover but may discount the costs to self such that jumping on the grenade is also morally
permissible.
However, there remain several shortcomings in Dancy’s account. First, as we
have already seen, many acts that are taken to be supererogatory simply do not involve
significant costs to the agent even while they do involve significant neutral value. Thus
in a great many cases of seemingly supererogatory acts, it is hard to believe that the costs
to the agent, even if valued in two ways, could significantly impact the value of the act,
all told. Indeed, some acts that are regularly considered supererogatory are actually
beneficial to the agent. Consider again the case of buying a book for a friend. Such a
favor may be morally optimific and also be quite pleasant for the agent, and yet it would
hardly seem obligatory. But valuing the costs to the agent twice in these cases will
simply add to the reasons in favor of the supererogatory act. For an example in which the
costs to the agent exist but seem insignificant, consider the case of contributing to
UNICEF instead of buying new tennis shoes. Such charitable contributions (at least
beyond a certain minimum) are widely regarded as paradigm examples of the
supererogatory, but Dancy’s theory does not account for this intuition. Assume that the
money, if donated to UNICEF, will be well spent on potentially life-saving efforts in
impoverished communities and also assume the agent already has a pair of reasonably
acceptable, if not particularly great, tennis shoes. If the money is donated, the agent will
forgo the value created by the improvement in his foot apparel, and on Dancy’s model,
this cost must be considered both neutrally and as a cost to the agent. But for Dancy’s
model to work in this case, we would have to accept that this cost, when valued both
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ways, would give the agent more moral reason to buy the tennis shoes than he has to
make the donation, despite the significant agent-neutral moral reasons generated by the
potentially life-saving benefits of the donation. This seems unlikely. Consider also the
stock example of supererogatory heroism: the soldier jumping on the grenade. If doing
so would save two others, then it seems quite plausible to say that the cost to self, if
valued twice, would give the soldier more moral reason to dive for cover than to smother
the grenade. But what if he could save ten, or twenty others? Does the act then become
obligatory, or can we say that his life, when valued both ways, outweighs the agent
neutral cost of those many other deaths? This seems implausible. It also hints at the
second problem with Dancy’s model.
The second problem with Dancy’s model is that even those cases that would
plausibly count as supererogatory on his view will count in a sort of backwards way. In
the UNICEF example, we saw that Dancy can allow that both giving to UNICEF and
buying the shoes are permissible only if buying the shoes is preferable when all values
are counted fully. Even if it were the case that the benefits of buying the shoes, when
valued twice, make buying the shoes preferable, this would seem to make giving to
UNICEF merely permissible and not supererogatory. The supererogatory act, then,
would be buying the shoes since it is the act that is better (than the minimally
permissible). Dancy’s model threatens to elevate acts that seem merely permissible to the
level of the supererogatory and to make seemingly supererogatory acts merely
permissible. He could object that the supererogatory act should simply be identified with
the act that would be required if agent-relative costs were discounted. But given that
agent-relative costs generate moral reasons on Dancy’s view, this would imply that when
12
all the moral reasons are on the table, a supererogatory act would necessarily be morally
suboptimal – it could not be the morally preferable course.
3. Beyond the Balance of Reasons
I have argued that moral theorists face a serious challenge in accounting for the
strong intuition that we can do better than morality demands – the intuition that morality
does not demand our very best. That is, they face a serious challenge when they attempt
to account for the supererogatory. If the supererogatory act is better than the minimally
permissible act, then we need to explain how it is that the act that is worse is nonetheless
permissible. It seems we will have good moral reason to prefer the act that is better, and
so how is it not a moral failing to do what is worse instead? And if our challenge is to
explain how it is permissible to omit the better (the supererogatory) act, it makes perfect
sense that we would try to answer this challenge by looking at the reasons that count
against it, be they non-moral reasons as on Wolf’s view or agent-relative moral reasons
as on Dancy’s. But as long as we are focused on the balance of reasons for and against
the supererogatory act, we will be unable to adequately account for the concept. Part of
the problem is that any such approach will get the default wrong. It is not the case that
the supererogatory omission requires a justification such that we need some good reason
to omit the supererogatory act, but rather, part of what is interesting about the
supererogatory act is that one often does not need any good reason to omit it. Shoveling
a neighbor’s walk (assuming that the neighbor is perfectly able to do this himself) or
buying a gift for a friend is not obligatory regardless of whether I have any great reason
not to. But then any appeal to the reasons against the supererogatory act will not really
13
explain why its omission is permissible. To adequately account for the supererogatory,
we need a very different approach.
Instead of looking at the reasons for and against the supererogatory act, we need
to appeal to a distinction between two sets of reasons: the reasons for and against the act
on the one hand, and the reasons for and against holding the agent accountable for the act
on the other. This is a distinction that has been noted by a number of utilitarians,
including Sidgwick and Millxxv, but the importance of the distinction for moral theory
(utilitarian or otherwise) has not been widely recognized. Moreover, this distinction
between the reasons for action and the reasons for holding people accountable for those
actions connects with another distinction between a prescriptive moral ought and a moral
obligation. This latter distinction is frequently invoked in our common moral discourse –
consider: ‘you really ought to visit your mother on her birthday, but you have got to at
least send a card.’xxvi But it has been largely ignored by moral theorists. That is, while
moral theorists often treat prescriptive oughts and obligations as identical, our common
sense morality recognizes an important difference between them. The difference is that
an obligation is conceptually tied to accountability and to holdings accountable, to what
you have got to do; that is, you are not obligated to perform an act unless you can
properly be obliged to perform it, or be held accountable for its performance (whether by
demands, or normative expectations, or by punitive sanctions in the case of failure,
sanctions like punishment, blame, or even guilt). But it is not the case that we can
properly be held accountable for everything that we ought morally to do. And this is
because an agent’s reasons for performing an act are not the same as our reasons for
holding the agent accountable for the act’s performance.
14
With this in mind, we can begin to answer the challenge as it was initially posed the challenge of plausibly accounting for acts as better and worse while also plausibly
accounting for a line of duty. An act is better or worse by virtue of the reasons for and
against it, and in the end, we should accept that we ought to do what we have the most
reason to do – we ought to do our best. But the line of duty is determined not by whether
we ought to perform the act but by whether we ought to be held accountable for its
performance. There will be cases then in which one’s obligations involve doing
somewhat less than she could do even if she really ought to do her very best.
The reasons we have to hold agents accountable for action may be tied to the risks
of allowing certain behaviors to go unchecked. As T.M. Scanlon puts it, “we can see the
need for limits on certain patterns of action… by seeing the ways in which we are at risk
if people are left free to decide to act in these ways.”xxvii Given the general interest in
avoiding injury, we will have very good reason to enforce norms against violence, for
example.xxviii Given their importance in supporting valuable coordination between
persons, we have reason to hold people accountable for keeping to their promises or
following through on their commitments.xxix In general, we have good reason to enforce
norms that protect against the callous disregard for the interests of others or that ensure
the adequate consideration of others’ interests. These reasons may connect also with
considerations of moral fairness. That we must demonstrate an adequate regard for the
interests of others does not imply an individual obligation to optimally promote those
interests. Rather, it involves recognizing a shared responsibility to promote those
interests. Each will ideally be required to do her fair share.
15
But given the limitless opportunities we have for promoting the interests of
others, it seems quite plausible that it would be morally undesirable to hold agents
accountable for being optimally beneficent. If we were accountable for doing our very
best, then few of our decisions would be protected from morality’s demands, and our
freedom to pursue personal projects would be undermined. In fact some will argue that
my own view does not go far enough in protecting that freedom. I will conclude with a
brief response to that objection.
4. Is This Still Too Demanding?
My view allows us to say that Kant is right to deny that duty involves doing all
the good that we could do and that the utilitarian is right to assert that we ought to do our
best. The mistake that they both make is to conflate the notion of duty with that of a
prescriptive ought. Distinguishing between the two allows us to recognize the limits of
duty without denying that we often have good reason to do better. One reason that some
will be hesitant to endorse this approach is that it may, despite the limits placed on duty,
seem to make morality, nonetheless, too demanding.
A central reason that we are concerned with supererogation is that it is important
for allowing options in the face of admitted value (one may omit an act he rightly
believes it would be better to perform). Some claim that to do this we must deny that we
morally ought to do our very best; we must deny that there is any moral failing when we
do not. They suggest that our freedom to pursue our personal projects requires protection
from conclusive moral reasons to do otherwise.
But a prescriptive ought is simply not in conflict with options, and the belief that
there is a conflict stems from a confusion with respect to the nature of moral demands.
16
Talk of morality’s “demands” involves a useful metaphor, but it can be misleading. A
moral prescription does not itself constitute a genuine demand. As we have seen, there
may be conclusive reasons for an agent to  even where it is not appropriate that anyone
demand that she  or that anyone demand an excuse (or sanction her) if she does not.
Moral reasons sometimes license the issuing of moral demands – we will have good
moral reason to hold agents accountable for certain acts. But moral reasons are not
themselves demands. And while our freedom does require protection from demands, it
does not require protection from moral reasons. Where one is not accountable for doing
as she ought, she is perfectly free to choose otherwise. And this should not surprise since
we probably do so with some regularity.
Buckley, C. “Man is Rescued by Stranger on Subway Tracks,” New York Times,
January 3, 2007.
ii
David Heyd provides a survey of how supererogation fits (or does not fit) within
various moral traditions. Heyd (1982).
iii
See, for example, Heyd (1982).
iv
I follow Alastair Norcross and Michael Slote in using the term ‘scalar’ in this way.
Norcross (2006) and Slote (1985).
v
Norcross (2006), p. 43. See also Norcross (1997) in which he rejects the notion of a
line between good and bad actions.
vi
Norcross (2006), p. 38.
vii
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.
viii
See Hill (1992), pp. 147-175.
ix
Kant (1964), p. 441. See also Baron (1995), chapter 1.
x
Kant (1993), p. 160-161 [155].
i
17
xi
ibid, p. 161 [155]. One thing to note is that Kant seems to consider the supermeritorious 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.
xii
ibid, p. 163 [157].
xiii
Kant states this most explicitly when he writes that “the rational being itself, must be
made the basis of all maxims of actions, never merely as a means but as the supreme
limiting condition in the use of all means, that is, always at the same time as an end.”
ibid, p. 161 [155], footnote.
xiv
See, for example, Raz (1975), Hurley (1995), Dreier (2004). I do not, however, believe
any of these proposals will work. For a thorough discussion of why, see chapter 2 of my
Beyond Obligation: Reasons, Demands, and the Problem of Supererogation. Doctoral
Dissertation. Georgetown University. (2008).
xv
Wolf (1982), p. 419.
xvi
Ibid, p. 421.
xvii
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).
xviii
Ibid, p. 438.
xix
Douglas Portmore argues for such a view in Portmore (2003) and Portmore (2008).
xx
This example comes from Dreier (2004).
xxi
Dancy (1993), p. 138.
xxii
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 [ibid, p.
139].
xxiii
Dancy (1993), p. 140.
xxiv
Ibid, p. 213.
xxv
Norcross also makes note of it in Norcross (2006).
xxvi
Credit is due to Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla for this example.
xxvii
Scanlon (1998), p. 201. 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 which
resolved this would contradict itself, inasmuch as many cases might occur in which one
would have need of the love and sympathy of others, and in which, by such a law of
nature, sprung from his own will, he would deprive himself of all hope of the aid he
desires…[Kant (1898)]”
xxviii
And probably norms against other forms of personal harms like theft and defamation.
xxix
Some of which may be expressed by taking on certain roles.
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References
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