Option 3 has never struck me as that terrible. Yeah, most people don't live up to the standards of perfection most of the time. That's far from "monster" territory. I think people who don't like moral demandingness are a bit too judgy about moral failure. Once you spell out what that actually means in a demanding moral theory, you see that it doesn't deserve the level of castigation we get used to in less demanding theories.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Epistemologists don't get their panties in a twist about not being perfectly rational agents, and they feel comfortable saying nobody lives up to that standard. Perfect moral agents are just the counterpart of that.
In order to permit gradations in moral judgment and censure, we presumably need to be able to rank different kinda of actions. Am I right about this? And if so, do we have good reason to think (a) that such a ranking is indeed possible and (b) that our ranking won't end up reprising what I take to be a big part of why the paradox of supererogation, namely that we end up thinking, eg, that failing to donate a kidney makes one a monster?
Failing to donate a kidney makes one much worse than donating a kidney does, just as killing a person makes one much worse than not killing a person.
But that doesn’t make you a monster. Presumably, if there is such a scale, then being a monster corresponds to some absolute point on the scale, rather than just being some amount below where one could be. Turning on the air conditioner, and failing to turn on the heat, might both make a 20 degree difference to the temperature of my house, but failing to turn on the heat just means my house isn’t hot, while turning on the air conditioner would make my house cold. It’s not cold right now in my house just because it’s 20 degrees colder than it could be.
I think the weird thing the comparativist needs to say in the supererogation vicinity comes in when we are talking about someone who does a bunch of things that seem intuitively supererogatory and doesn’t do a bunch of things that seem obligatory. This is someone like the character Mindy St Clair from the show The Good Place, who ends up in “the medium place” because she both saved a large number of lives in an altruistic way and did lots of drugs and casual sex in ways that hurt lots of people.
I think the comparativist should say that such a person is neither a saint nor a monster, but actually equally good or bad to an ordinary person, who does what they ought to but doesn’t do the supererogatory. This feels like a weird judgment, but I think it’s just because this is a truly weird person.
- The intuition behind insisting on the possibility of superogation seems highly suspect to me--we want some demanding acts to be superogatory because we don't want to feel like we have to do them! (Sidebar: one way of reading the ethics of Jesus is that he insisted that various acts commonly understood to be superogatory were actually obligatory, and that some which the Pharisees, etc. understood to be obligatory were not even that.)
- But! One could say that the failure to fulfill certain (highly demanding) duties is not *blameworthy* (or at least not *that* blameworthy or fitting for indignation and other blame-associated reactive attitudes, including self-directed ones like guilt), because they're so hard for us finite beings, etc., so even if donating your kidney is actually obligatory, you shouldn't get mad at others for failing to do it or feel bad yourself for not doing it.
- I forget if this is the solution you offered in your U of T talk or something I made up just now: You have a right to decide what to do with your body. You have the prerogative to waive that right, but no duty to do so even for the sake of an optimal end. So even though donating your kidney would be optimal, you can't have a duty to do that because you have no duty to waive the right to decide what to do with your kidneys.
- One nice upshot of the above solution: Let's assume you waive certain rights upon entering into certain special relationships. If you become a parent, you waive the right to do whatever you'd like (barring harm to others) with your resources, perhaps even including your bodily resources, because you take on duties to determinate others that demand use of those resources. So if your child gets sick and needs a new kidney, we can say that you have a duty to give your child your kidney (assuming no other kidney is easily available, etc.), even if you wouldn't have said duty to a perfect stranger. (Christian ethics sidebar no. 2: the injunction to "love your neighbour as yourself" could be read as a call to treat our minimal relationships with other members of the moral community as duty-providing in the same way as our special relationships with chosen intimates.) (Chinese philosophy sidebar no. 1: the classical Confucian political ideal casts the ruler as "father to the people"; even Sun Yat-sen is still commonly called 國父 guofu, "father to the nation" or "national father" in the RoC (Taiwan). Confucian ethics is all about duties deriving from special relationships, so maybe the underlying idea here is that the ruler has the parental relationship with the whole people, and therefore takes on the duties of care derived from that relationship *to the whole people*.)
- One problem with the above solution, tho: does that mean minimal costs to your body can never be obligatory? What if Singer's pond is full of brambles that would scratch you as you wade in to save the child--does that mean you don't have to do it, because you have no duty to waive your right to bodily autonomy and endure those scratches? (Chinese philosophy sidebar no. 2: Mencius complains about ethical egoist Yang Zhu, who "would not pluck a hair from his head to save the whole world". So Mencius seems to endorse both demanding special obligations to family and subjects, etc., *and* relaxed obligations of beneficence to strangers.)
- Possible solution to that problem: well, maybe your relevant right is not to choose whatever happens with your body, but to refuse to endure serious costs to yourself. Scratches are no big deal, so you have no right to refuse them and therefore not save the child; but giving up one of your kidneys is a huge deal, so you have a right not to do it. (Where to draw the line though..?)
First, I can't emphasize enough that I dabble in philosophy.
Kantian perfect/imperfect duties aren't sufficient. The clarity of negative rights plus a flexible utilitarianism seem to balance protecting individual liberty with encouraging supererogation.
Imho Kantianism once again delivers exactly the right verdict here. On Kantianism there isn't even a paradox in the first place: "Best" doesn't entail "must", on the Kantian view, because "Making the world as good as possible" isn't a perfect duty (as its rejection doesn't lead to a contradiction in conception)
That's not actually a full solution, though. The paradox isn't just to explain why you're not a moral monster for, say, failing to donate a kidney, but to do so in a way that doesn't put failing to donate on the same moral level as donating. Donating should still be better. Kantianism can only explain the former, but it can't explain why donating a kidney is better than not donating one, since neither violates a duty and Kantianism is only an account of duties.
Will have to read the literature this is interesting. My immediate thoughts (as someone who tends toward kinda contractualist, non-moral realist thinking)
1. Supererogatory behavior seems to generally be praised because it is optional. People wouldn't find it as impressive if it were an obligation. Ofc doesn't mean it shouldn't be, but the felt tension of "if so good why not obligated" doesn't really make sense to me bc of that.
1a. like with most cases of positive action, let alone sacrifice, on someone elses behalf, because of the risk of being exhausting and the variability of everyone's personal circumstances, we can't really make a good policy out of "you must donate your kidney."
1b. In any case who invested me with the authority to go around demanding kidneys?
2. It seems perfectly possible to me that everyone behaves morally sub-optimally and that the reason we don't like hearing that is that we just expect an unreasonable degree of moral perfection from ourselves.
2a. In fact treating ourselves as "good" or not based on how much good we do seems like a bad idea to me. not one of us is good yada yada.
that said none of that justifies me personally not donating my kidney rn, it just (I think metaethically, I'm a philosophy outsider idk) means that "obligating" it is a weird proposition
OK I feel like this must be an extremely silly category error, but...why can't we alleviate -- if not resolve -- the paradox by being quantitative? At least by allowing some ordinality? Like, you arguably owe a kidney to your cousin who used to take care of your dog more than you do some stranger who has never done anything for you. (Let's ignore the fact that the world is interconnected and the stranger may have grown your food and blah. Possibly true but then we'd never get anywhere!) And there is a threshold of "it would be nice, but whatever", below which good deeds are not owed. Seems pretty coherent if supererogation does not have to be a binary thing? Of course then we've kind of punted and ended up with a new set of questions re: where to draw the boundaries -- questions concerning social contracts and the mores that undergird them...which are different but also interesting?
I think this can be explained by treating mandating something as an action in itself.
Then an act is obligatory iff it would be good to mandate it, and an act is supererogatory if it is good to perform, but not good to mandate.
This raises the possibility of multiple layers that are strict subsets of "obligatory", and goes against one of the common axioms of deontic logic, but that will just have to be dealt with. It does not seem true that, if something is obligatory, it is obligatory to make it obligatory..
I never said that donating a kidney is costless! Of course, I agree with you that it’s not. Giving a kidney is painful, and you’re at greater risk of future kidney failure.
But in many real-world cases, it’s clear that the expected costs to the donor are dwarfed by the expected benefits. This is especially true given the way that kidneys are allocated in the US. If you donate a kidney, you might make it possible for an entire chain of donations to take place. (Because some people are willing to donate to help their loved ones, but they’re not actually compatible as donors. So they agree to donate their spare kidney iff someone else donates to their loved one. Thus a single donation can unlock two, three, or even a dozen donations!)
I agree with you that it might matter why the potential beneficiary is suffering. If it’s their own fault, they might be less deserving.
But the supererogationist never says “every donation is supererogatory.” They only say: “some donations can be supererogatory.” If supererogation is paradoxical, then nothing can be supererogatory, no matter the expected benefits and costs. That extreme claim seems hard to believe—but as I say, it’s not totally obvious how to avoid this conclusion!
“I take issue with any conception of ethics that requires me to do something just because someone calculates that my ‘expected cost’ is, in their judgment, low enough.”
The whole point of supererogation is that you *aren’t* always required to do whatever minimizes expected costs! You don’t even have to do so in cases where you’re acting with complete certainty.
It sounds to me like you’re making two points:
1) donating a kidney isn’t (always?) morally for the best
2) doing what’s morally for the best isn’t always morally required
I agree with you that I didn’t say much about (1) in the post, since I was just using kidneys as an illustrative example. You could substitute any other example you like—donating blood, giving cash, volunteering.
But if your beef is just with (2), you should be a fan of supererogation! Then the question is how to make sense of that category.
Option 3 has never struck me as that terrible. Yeah, most people don't live up to the standards of perfection most of the time. That's far from "monster" territory. I think people who don't like moral demandingness are a bit too judgy about moral failure. Once you spell out what that actually means in a demanding moral theory, you see that it doesn't deserve the level of castigation we get used to in less demanding theories.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Epistemologists don't get their panties in a twist about not being perfectly rational agents, and they feel comfortable saying nobody lives up to that standard. Perfect moral agents are just the counterpart of that.
In order to permit gradations in moral judgment and censure, we presumably need to be able to rank different kinda of actions. Am I right about this? And if so, do we have good reason to think (a) that such a ranking is indeed possible and (b) that our ranking won't end up reprising what I take to be a big part of why the paradox of supererogation, namely that we end up thinking, eg, that failing to donate a kidney makes one a monster?
Failing to donate a kidney makes one much worse than donating a kidney does, just as killing a person makes one much worse than not killing a person.
But that doesn’t make you a monster. Presumably, if there is such a scale, then being a monster corresponds to some absolute point on the scale, rather than just being some amount below where one could be. Turning on the air conditioner, and failing to turn on the heat, might both make a 20 degree difference to the temperature of my house, but failing to turn on the heat just means my house isn’t hot, while turning on the air conditioner would make my house cold. It’s not cold right now in my house just because it’s 20 degrees colder than it could be.
I think the weird thing the comparativist needs to say in the supererogation vicinity comes in when we are talking about someone who does a bunch of things that seem intuitively supererogatory and doesn’t do a bunch of things that seem obligatory. This is someone like the character Mindy St Clair from the show The Good Place, who ends up in “the medium place” because she both saved a large number of lives in an altruistic way and did lots of drugs and casual sex in ways that hurt lots of people.
I think the comparativist should say that such a person is neither a saint nor a monster, but actually equally good or bad to an ordinary person, who does what they ought to but doesn’t do the supererogatory. This feels like a weird judgment, but I think it’s just because this is a truly weird person.
Some thoughts on this:
- The intuition behind insisting on the possibility of superogation seems highly suspect to me--we want some demanding acts to be superogatory because we don't want to feel like we have to do them! (Sidebar: one way of reading the ethics of Jesus is that he insisted that various acts commonly understood to be superogatory were actually obligatory, and that some which the Pharisees, etc. understood to be obligatory were not even that.)
- But! One could say that the failure to fulfill certain (highly demanding) duties is not *blameworthy* (or at least not *that* blameworthy or fitting for indignation and other blame-associated reactive attitudes, including self-directed ones like guilt), because they're so hard for us finite beings, etc., so even if donating your kidney is actually obligatory, you shouldn't get mad at others for failing to do it or feel bad yourself for not doing it.
- I forget if this is the solution you offered in your U of T talk or something I made up just now: You have a right to decide what to do with your body. You have the prerogative to waive that right, but no duty to do so even for the sake of an optimal end. So even though donating your kidney would be optimal, you can't have a duty to do that because you have no duty to waive the right to decide what to do with your kidneys.
- One nice upshot of the above solution: Let's assume you waive certain rights upon entering into certain special relationships. If you become a parent, you waive the right to do whatever you'd like (barring harm to others) with your resources, perhaps even including your bodily resources, because you take on duties to determinate others that demand use of those resources. So if your child gets sick and needs a new kidney, we can say that you have a duty to give your child your kidney (assuming no other kidney is easily available, etc.), even if you wouldn't have said duty to a perfect stranger. (Christian ethics sidebar no. 2: the injunction to "love your neighbour as yourself" could be read as a call to treat our minimal relationships with other members of the moral community as duty-providing in the same way as our special relationships with chosen intimates.) (Chinese philosophy sidebar no. 1: the classical Confucian political ideal casts the ruler as "father to the people"; even Sun Yat-sen is still commonly called 國父 guofu, "father to the nation" or "national father" in the RoC (Taiwan). Confucian ethics is all about duties deriving from special relationships, so maybe the underlying idea here is that the ruler has the parental relationship with the whole people, and therefore takes on the duties of care derived from that relationship *to the whole people*.)
- One problem with the above solution, tho: does that mean minimal costs to your body can never be obligatory? What if Singer's pond is full of brambles that would scratch you as you wade in to save the child--does that mean you don't have to do it, because you have no duty to waive your right to bodily autonomy and endure those scratches? (Chinese philosophy sidebar no. 2: Mencius complains about ethical egoist Yang Zhu, who "would not pluck a hair from his head to save the whole world". So Mencius seems to endorse both demanding special obligations to family and subjects, etc., *and* relaxed obligations of beneficence to strangers.)
- Possible solution to that problem: well, maybe your relevant right is not to choose whatever happens with your body, but to refuse to endure serious costs to yourself. Scratches are no big deal, so you have no right to refuse them and therefore not save the child; but giving up one of your kidneys is a huge deal, so you have a right not to do it. (Where to draw the line though..?)
First, I can't emphasize enough that I dabble in philosophy.
Kantian perfect/imperfect duties aren't sufficient. The clarity of negative rights plus a flexible utilitarianism seem to balance protecting individual liberty with encouraging supererogation.
Imho Kantianism once again delivers exactly the right verdict here. On Kantianism there isn't even a paradox in the first place: "Best" doesn't entail "must", on the Kantian view, because "Making the world as good as possible" isn't a perfect duty (as its rejection doesn't lead to a contradiction in conception)
That's not actually a full solution, though. The paradox isn't just to explain why you're not a moral monster for, say, failing to donate a kidney, but to do so in a way that doesn't put failing to donate on the same moral level as donating. Donating should still be better. Kantianism can only explain the former, but it can't explain why donating a kidney is better than not donating one, since neither violates a duty and Kantianism is only an account of duties.
Will have to read the literature this is interesting. My immediate thoughts (as someone who tends toward kinda contractualist, non-moral realist thinking)
1. Supererogatory behavior seems to generally be praised because it is optional. People wouldn't find it as impressive if it were an obligation. Ofc doesn't mean it shouldn't be, but the felt tension of "if so good why not obligated" doesn't really make sense to me bc of that.
1a. like with most cases of positive action, let alone sacrifice, on someone elses behalf, because of the risk of being exhausting and the variability of everyone's personal circumstances, we can't really make a good policy out of "you must donate your kidney."
1b. In any case who invested me with the authority to go around demanding kidneys?
2. It seems perfectly possible to me that everyone behaves morally sub-optimally and that the reason we don't like hearing that is that we just expect an unreasonable degree of moral perfection from ourselves.
2a. In fact treating ourselves as "good" or not based on how much good we do seems like a bad idea to me. not one of us is good yada yada.
that said none of that justifies me personally not donating my kidney rn, it just (I think metaethically, I'm a philosophy outsider idk) means that "obligating" it is a weird proposition
OK I feel like this must be an extremely silly category error, but...why can't we alleviate -- if not resolve -- the paradox by being quantitative? At least by allowing some ordinality? Like, you arguably owe a kidney to your cousin who used to take care of your dog more than you do some stranger who has never done anything for you. (Let's ignore the fact that the world is interconnected and the stranger may have grown your food and blah. Possibly true but then we'd never get anywhere!) And there is a threshold of "it would be nice, but whatever", below which good deeds are not owed. Seems pretty coherent if supererogation does not have to be a binary thing? Of course then we've kind of punted and ended up with a new set of questions re: where to draw the boundaries -- questions concerning social contracts and the mores that undergird them...which are different but also interesting?
I think this can be explained by treating mandating something as an action in itself.
Then an act is obligatory iff it would be good to mandate it, and an act is supererogatory if it is good to perform, but not good to mandate.
This raises the possibility of multiple layers that are strict subsets of "obligatory", and goes against one of the common axioms of deontic logic, but that will just have to be dealt with. It does not seem true that, if something is obligatory, it is obligatory to make it obligatory..
I never said that donating a kidney is costless! Of course, I agree with you that it’s not. Giving a kidney is painful, and you’re at greater risk of future kidney failure.
But in many real-world cases, it’s clear that the expected costs to the donor are dwarfed by the expected benefits. This is especially true given the way that kidneys are allocated in the US. If you donate a kidney, you might make it possible for an entire chain of donations to take place. (Because some people are willing to donate to help their loved ones, but they’re not actually compatible as donors. So they agree to donate their spare kidney iff someone else donates to their loved one. Thus a single donation can unlock two, three, or even a dozen donations!)
I agree with you that it might matter why the potential beneficiary is suffering. If it’s their own fault, they might be less deserving.
But the supererogationist never says “every donation is supererogatory.” They only say: “some donations can be supererogatory.” If supererogation is paradoxical, then nothing can be supererogatory, no matter the expected benefits and costs. That extreme claim seems hard to believe—but as I say, it’s not totally obvious how to avoid this conclusion!
“I take issue with any conception of ethics that requires me to do something just because someone calculates that my ‘expected cost’ is, in their judgment, low enough.”
The whole point of supererogation is that you *aren’t* always required to do whatever minimizes expected costs! You don’t even have to do so in cases where you’re acting with complete certainty.
It sounds to me like you’re making two points:
1) donating a kidney isn’t (always?) morally for the best
2) doing what’s morally for the best isn’t always morally required
I agree with you that I didn’t say much about (1) in the post, since I was just using kidneys as an illustrative example. You could substitute any other example you like—donating blood, giving cash, volunteering.
But if your beef is just with (2), you should be a fan of supererogation! Then the question is how to make sense of that category.