Does Morality Demand Our Very Best?

18

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 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 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.

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.

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 (super-meritorious) 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 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 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 non-moral 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 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.