Supererogation, wrongdoing, and vice: on the autonomy of the ethics of virtue (original) (raw)

"On Widening the Moral Sphere" (published in Philosophy in the Contemporary World vol. 22 no.2)

Considerations of justice and rights are assumed to present problems for the idea that we should do, that which we take to be, supererogatory. I argue that careful consideration of how we think of justice and rights lead to the conclusion that “supererogatory” actions are actually better grouped within the class of acts we identify as moral requirements. My argument is based on our common understanding of justice as being incompatible with free-riding. Additionally, I focus attention on our implicit assumption that we possess the right to benefit by that which, we agree, is made possible from the willingness of others to go beyond perceived moral requirements. Thus, I conclude we should re-think where we draw the line demarcating the required from the saintly. Keywords: Justice, Rights, Supererogation, Heroism, Saintliness, Moral requirements, Free-riding

Supererogation, Wrongdoing, and Vice

The Journal of Philosophy, 1986

Gray for very helpful discussion on this and related topics. I am grateful to Laurence Thomas for suggesting to me the need for the comments at the beginning of section iv. Finally, I would like to thank Stephanie Talbott, without whose contributions this paper would not have been written. ' For want of a better term, I will use 'vicious' as the contrary of 'virtuous', as 'vice' is the contrary of 'virtue'. As I emphasize below in section iii, not every shortcoming in motivation is so great as to be vicious, any more than every shortcoming in character is so great as to be a vice.

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 14, no. 2

2018

The journal is founded on the principle of publisher-funded open access. There are no publication fees for authors, and public access to articles is free of charge and is available to all readers under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Funding for the journal has been made possible through the generous commitment of the Gould School of Law and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy aspires to be the leading venue for the best new work in the fields that it covers, and it is governed by a correspondingly high editorial standard. The journal welcomes submissions of articles in any of these and related fields of research. The journal is interested in work in the history of ethics that bears directly on topics of contemporary interest, but does not consider articles of purely historical interest. It is the view of the associate editors that the journal's high standard does not preclude publishing work that is critical in nature, provided that it is constructive, wellargued, current, and of sufficiently general interest.

Supererogation and ethical methodology: A reply to Mellema

Philosophia, 1994

The concept of Supererogation is primafacie paradoxical. How can actions that are morally good be left outside the domain of the morally required? Sensitive to this incongruity in the concept of Supererogation, Gregory Mellema formulates two principles, which at first seem appealing, yet are easily shown to be mutually incompatible.' Mellema's project consists of an attempt to preserve the basic intuitive elements in his two principles, while showing how they can be reconciled, His main concern, however, is with the conclusions regarding the limits of moral obligation which are assumed to emerge from the discussion. The main lesson I would like to draw from Mellema's enterprise relates to the limits of his philosophical method. The status of supererogatory acts is heavily contested, and cannot be simply decided by intuition. Three principal views have been suggested in the history of ethics: rejecting the existence (or indeed the very possibility) of supererogatory acts; admitting them into the sphere of moral acts as a distinct category (added to the three traditional deontic categories of the permissible, the obligatory, and the forbidden); and recognizing their possibility-even value-but ultimately reducing them to the obligatory. I have elsewhere named these three alternative views anti-supererogationism, unqualified supererogationism, an qualified supererogationism, respectively. 2 They suggest three different solutions to the apparent paradox of supererogation.

Ethics: The Key Thinkers (2nd edition)

Ethics: The Key Thinkers (2nd edition), 2023

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Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd, eds., Virtues and Their Vices

Journal of Analytic Theology

One of the more important areas of retrieval in contemporary work in ethics and moral theology is the discussion of virtues and vices in the tradition. Our contemporary discussion has not limited itself to generic retrieval-simply taking ancient wisdom and applying it wholesale today-but is a creative reworking of ideas and traditions in conversation with ancient thinkers. Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the most important representative invoked in this discussion, with a specific focus on his retrieval and development of Aristotle. In this particular volume, readers are given an excellent introduction into this conversation, and are exposed to the kind of constructive work being done. The essays, by and large, do a fine job of historical discussion balanced with contemporary issues/retrieval, that is interwoven into the author's own constructive agenda. In this sense, this volume would be a perfect way to start one's research on the virtues and vices, but it would also serve as a helpful outline of contemporary thought on the topic. To further add to the usability of the volume, it is helpfully broken down into five major sections: I. The Cardinal Virtues; II. The Capital Vices and Corrective Virtues; III. Intellectual Virtues; IV. The Theological Virtues; and, V. Virtue Across the Disciplines. These sections seek to address central aspects of the traditional discussion of the virtues and vices that, nonetheless, create room for our own contemporary retrieval and development. Importantly, the chapters do not seek to assert a single, uniform interpretation of the virtues and their vices, as if this volume were a constructive argument for an overarching view on the topic. Rather, one sees tensions and rifts within the authors, but these points of conflict prove to be informative and clarifying rather than muddying the issues and creating confusion. The above provides recommendation enough, and the volume deserves it. It fills a major lacuna in the field, and will be a helpful resource for students and researches alike. It would be impossible to go through all of the chapters, or even the sections, in a short review; and like all edited volumes there is a wide range of quality and focus. Therefore, in light of the focus of this journal, and the strand of virtue tradition developed in this volume, it proves helpful to focus on the theological issues at hand. The editors' self-description is philosophical, and they have included a chapter in the final section on theology and the virtues, written by Stephen Pope. This distinction, between philosophy and theology, creates a rather odd tension in the volume, especially when working so much with a figure like Aquinas who would not have separated these out so cleanly.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy

The Philosophical Review, 1999

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