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Transitivity, Moral Latitude, and Supererogation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2016

DOUGLAS W. PORTMORE
DOUGLAS W. PORTMORE*
Affiliation:
Arizona State Universitydwportmore@gmail.com
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Abstract

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 286 - 298
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 On my conception, to perform a supererogatory act is morally to exceed the demands of morality – that is, to do something morally better than the minimum required by morality. Others conceive of supererogation differently. For instance, Dale Dorsey holds that to perform a supererogatory act is morally to exceed the demands of rationality – that is, to do something morally better than the minimum required by rationality. To illustrate the difference, suppose that morality demands that I give at least 10% of my surplus income to the poor, whereas rationality requires only that I give at least 5% of my surplus income to the poor. Assuming, then, that it is morally better to give 6% of one's surplus income to the poor than to give only 5%, giving 6% would count as supererogatory on Dorsey's conception but not on my own. Clearly, then, Dorsey and I are talking about different concepts even though we are using the same technical term to refer to them. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with using a technical term in whatever way one chooses. Nonetheless, I think that when ordinary people talk about going beyond the call of duty, they're talking about going beyond the call of moral duty, not going beyond the call of rational duty. See Dorsey, Dale, ‘The Supererogatory, and How to Accommodate It’, Utilitas 25 (2013), pp. 355–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And for this and other criticisms of Dorsey's view, see Archer, Alfred, ‘The Supererogatory and How Not To Accommodate It: A Reply to Dorsey’, Utilitas 28 (2016), pp. 179–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Note that this is substantively neutral. It does not, for instance, presuppose consequentialism. After all, it could be that an agent morally ought always to prefer how things would be if she were to refrain from violating Kant's categorical imperative to how things would be if she were to violate Kant's categorical imperative. For more on this as well as a defence of this account of moral reasons, see Portmore, Douglas W., Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 3.

3 Hill, Thomas E. Jr, Human Welfare and Moral Worth (Oxford, 2002), p. 206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Hill, Human Welfare, p. 204.

5 Perhaps, it also requires us to take advantage of certain golden opportunities – that is, opportunities that are especially favourable and not likely to arise again. For more on this, see Noggle, Robert, ‘Give ‘Till It Hurts? Beneficence, Imperfect Duties, and a Moderate Response to the Aid Question’, Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009), pp. 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 This sort of problem was first introduced by Mellema, Gregory, ‘Supererogation and the Fulfilment of Duty’, Journal of Value Inquiry 25 (1991), pp. 167–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Two options are not the same option (and, thus, are other options) if and only if it is not the case that each entails the other.

8 Walking and walking in the park are both options; they're just not alternative options. X and Y are alternative options if and only if, although X-ing and Y-ing are each options, both X-ing and Y-ing is not an option.

9 One may doubt that there will always be a maximally specific option – that is, an option that is not entailed by any other option. For instance, one may think that I have all the following options: (Opt1) thinking of a number greater than one, (Opt2) thinking of a number greater than two, (Opt3) thinking of a number greater than three, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Thus, one may conclude that for any option Opt n , there will always be another option Opt n +1 that entails it. But, in any case, if there are no maximally specific options, then I just need to replace talk of maximally specific options with talk of normatively maximal options, where an option is normatively maximal if and only if every option that entails it is normatively equivalent to it – that is, equivalent to it in terms of all normatively relevant factors. For more on this, see Campbell Brown, ‘Consequentialism, Maximalism, and the Structure of Acts’ (2016, unpublished manuscript). Still, one may further worry that there won't always be a normatively maximal option. Suppose, for instance, that there is no limit to how large a number I can think of and that for whatever number I do think of, God will give me and my loved ones precisely those many days in heaven. In that case, no matter what number n I think of, there will be an alternative option, Opt n +1, that will be better in terms of the normatively relevant considerations. And so, in this case, there seems to be no normatively maximal option. But this is a problem for the maximalist account only if we think that I must have a permissible option in this sort of case. After all, if there is no permissible normatively maximal option that entails my opting for Opt n , the maximalist will just claim that my opting for Opt n is impermissible. And, to my mind, this seems exactly right. In this case, it seems that I will do something impermissible no matter what I do, because no matter what I do there will be a better and no costlier option that I could have just as easily opted for but didn't. Thanks to Ángel Pinillos and Brad Armendt for pressing me on this.

10 I defend (4) in Portmore, Douglas W., ‘Perform Your Best Option’, The Journal of Philosophy 110 (2013), pp. 436–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But see Gert, Joshua, ‘Perform a Justified Option’, Utilitas 26 (2014), pp. 206–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for some criticisms. In Commonsense Consequentialism, I defend (1), (2) and (3). And I defend the general idea that the deontic status of an act (e.g. baking) that is entailed by another (e.g. baking a pie) is derivative of the deontic statuses of the acts that entail it in both Douglas W. Portmore, ‘Maximalism and Moral Harmony’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming) and Douglas W. Portmore, ‘Maximalism vs. Omnism about Permissibility’, an unpublished manuscript available at <http://bit.ly/1Svw0Eh> (2016).

11 I borrow the label ‘transitivity problem’ as well as the basic way of presenting the problem as a kind of paradox from Alfred Archer, ‘Moral Obligation, Self-Interest and the Transitivity Problem’, Utilitas (forthcoming). Admittedly, Dorsey doesn't present the problem as one involving transitivity, but Archer and I find it illuminating to think of it in this way. Moreover, Dorsey's triad seems relevantly similar to the triad presented by Frances Kamm, and she does present the problem as one involving transitivity. See Kamm, Frances M., ‘Supererogation and Obligation’, The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985), pp. 118–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I should also note that Archer offers a different (and ingenious) solution to the transitivity problem, one that involves denying that the moral justifying strength of a moral reason must be proportionate to its moral requiring strength. I don't find this denial plausible and so favour the solution that I offer below. In Commonsense Consequentialism, I argue that the moral justifying strength of a non-moral reason (e.g. a self-interested reason) can be greater than its moral requiring strength, but I believe that the moral justifying strength of a moral reason must be proportionate to its moral requiring strength.

12 See Dorsey, ‘The Supererogatory’ and Kamm, ‘Supererogation and Obligation’.

13 See Dorsey, ‘The Supererogatory’, p. 365.

14 See Dorsey, ‘The Supererogatory’, p. 366.

15 As Josh Gert has explained, the strength value of a reason is a concise representation of the way it affects the deontic statuses of acts across a range of contexts. Thus, if one reason has greater moral justifying strength than another, it must make it morally permissible to do anything that the other reason would make it morally permissible to do. That is just what it means for one reason to have greater moral justifying strength than another. And, if that's right, the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation must be transitive. See Gert, Joshua, ‘Normative Strength and the Balance of Reasons’, Philosophical Review 116 (2007), pp. 533–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Dorsey, ‘The Supererogatory’, p. 365.

17 We should also deny the part of C1 that says, ‘Saving the ten is supererogatory’. At best, Gus merely partially fulfils the imperfect duty of beneficences in saving the ten distant strangers.

18 In the case of Roy, we are to assume that everything besides whether these ten distant strangers live or die will be the same regardless of whether or not he assaults Jerry. Thus, we are to assume that Roy will, in the future, dedicate the same amount of time and resources to each of his moral and prudential goals regardless of whether he assaults Jerry and saves these ten at present. And this is why advocates of the standard account must hold that Roy has more reason to threaten Jerry than to refrain from doing so, for how things would be if he were to assault Jerry is to be preferred to how things would be if he were not to do so. But, on maximalism, we don't look at how things would be if he were, at present, to act this way or that way. Instead, we look at how things would be if he were to perform this or that maximally specific option over the course of his future. And we derive his reasons for performing this or that action at present in terms of what these maximally specific options entail his doing at present. And what we find is that all his optimal maximally specific options entail his saving not n plus these ten strangers, but only n strangers.

19 See Dorsey, ‘The Supererogatory’, p. 365.

20 I thank Dale Dorsey, Brad Hooker, and the participants at the 2015 Workshop on Supererogation (Concept and Context) in Basel, Switzerland, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.