Supererogation Across Normative Domains

The phenomenon of moral supererogation—action that goes beyond what moral duty requires—is familiar. In this paper, I argue that the concept of supererogation is applicable beyond the moral domain. After an introductory section 1, I outline in section 2 what I take to be the structure of moral supererogation, explaining how it comes to be an authentic normative category. In section 3, I show that there are structurally similar phenomena in other normative domains—those of prudence, etiquette, and the epistemic—and give examples of acts of supererogation of each of these types.     

Supererogation in Deontic Logic: Metatheory for DWE and Some Close Neighbours

In "Doing Well Enough: Toward a Logic for Common Sense Morality", Paul McNamara sets out a semantics for a deontic logic which contains the operator It is supererogatory that. As well as having a binary accessibility relation on worlds, that semantics contains a relative ordering relation, . For worlds u, v and w, we say that u w v when v is at least as good as u according to the standards of w. In this paper we axiomatize logics complete over three versions of the semantics. We call the strongest of these logics DWE for Doing Well Enough.     

FROM VIRTUE TO DECENCY

Abstract: In her work on virtue ethics Rosalind Hursthouse has formulated an Aristotelian criterion of rightness that understands rightness in terms of what the virtuous person would do. It is argued here that this kind of criterion does not allow enough room for the category of the supererogatory and that right and wrong should rather be understood in terms of the characteristic behavior of decent persons. Furthermore, it is suggested that this kind of approach has the added advantage of allowing one to make sense of the centrality of negative precepts in commonsense morality.     

Doing well enough: Toward a logic for common-sense morality

On the traditional deontic framework, what is required (what morality demands) and what is optimal (what morality recommends) can't be distinguished and hence they can't both be represented. Although the morally optional can be represented, the supererogatory (exceeding morality's demands), one of its proper subclasses, cannot be. The morally indifferent, another proper subclass of the optional-one obviously disjoint from the supererogatory-is also not representable. Ditto for the permissibly suboptimal and the morally significant. Finally, the minimum that morality allows finds no place in the traditional scheme. With a focus on the question, “What would constitute a hospitable logical neighborhood for the concept of supererogation?”, I present and motivate an enriched logical and semantic framework for representing all these concepts of common sense morality.     

Obligations In Medical Crises: Treatment and Protocols

This article adduces several lines of argument to try to analyze the need for certain sorts of interventions in medical crises. The recent Ebola crisis is taken as exemplary, and other similarly serious medical situations requiring intervention, such as the endemic presence of Valley fever in parts of California, are alluded to. The overall contention is that our duties in medical crises may be somewhat stronger than previously constructed by analysts. The work of Kuhse and Singer is cited, and the article concludes that there are special moral obligations to respond to international medical emergencies when they arise.