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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
I begin by examining the answer to a traditional puzzle concerning supererogatory acts: if they are good to do, why are they not required? The answer often given is that they are optional acts because they cost the agent too much. This view has parallels with the traditional view of religious sacrifice, which involves offering up something or someone valuable as a gift or victim and experiencing a ‘cost’ as part of the ritual. There are problems with the idea that costs justify the optional nature of supererogatory acts, however, and I suggest that these problems mirror the tensions that are found in Christian theology when a traditional view of sacrifice is adopted.
1 J.O. Urmson, ‘Saints and Heroes’, in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. A.I. Melden: University of Washington Press, 1958. Reprinted in Moral Concepts, ed. Joel Feinberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press Year 1969 60–73.
2 Ibid.61.
3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971) 100.
4 A term borrowed from Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
5 Diana Henderson, The Scottish Regiments, Glasgow 1993, 136.
6 Ibid. 232 Kagan means to include all form of cost here, including second-order costs such as opportunity costs or the effect on me of costs to others. As a strict utilitarian he asks us to perform the sum of what will count toward the ‘overall good’ as the method for determining the moral worth of the act.
7 Reported in “The Tablet” magazine, 11 October 2003 in an article ‘For the Love of Africa’ by Maggie Black.
8 Does the strangeness of this counter-example come about because supererogation does not really apply to a life, but only to acts? To pursue a ‘supererogatory lifestyle’ might seem to be a choice of a different sort from the choice involved in performing a supererogatory act. I think it is a distinction which deserves further consideration, but that is does not affect the point at issue.
9 From L Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 99.
10 Ibid. 100.
11 R. Daly S.J. Sacrifice Unveiled – The True Meaning of Christian Sacrifice, T&T Clark International, London, 2009.
12 Ibid. 141.
13 Holy Bible Authorised Version, Luke 22: 19–20.
14 Daly, ibid.228–229.
15 The theology of the gift was raised by Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical ‘Caritas in Veritate’ (2009) and has been a frequent topic of conversation in French philosophy and theology, notably between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion.
16 McGoldrick, Patricia M., ‘Saints and Heroes: A Plea for the Supererogatory’, Philosophy 59 (1984) 523–528 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Urmson, ibid. 63.
19 The expression ‘emptying’ of the self is not perhaps quite right. The beneficiary of the supererogatory act might be expected to want a real person to commune with, rather than a shell. Thanks to Chris Cowley for this point. Nonetheless, I'll preserve the term here because it is carried on Daly's theological discussions. A better way of expressing what I mean is well put by Dreyfus and Kelly, below.
20 Holy Bible Authorised Version Matthew 26:39.
21 In H. Dreyfus and S.D. Kelly, All Things Shining, Free Press, Simon and Shuster, New York, 2011.
22 Ibid.11.
