I basically agree with Scott. You need to ask what it even means to call something âobligatoryâ. For many utilitarians (from Sidgwick to Peter Singer), they mean nothing more than what you have most reason to do. But that is not what anyone else means by the term, which (as J.S. Mill better recognized) has important connections to blameworthiness. So then the question arises why you would think that anything less than perfection was automatically deserving of blame. You might just as well claim that anything better than maximal evil is thereby deserving of praise!
For related discussion, see my posts:
Deontic Pluralism (on different things that âoughtâ and âobligationâ can mean)
Imperfection is OK! (on how to think about our moral imperfection, and why we neednât feel bad about itâunless we do something far more egregious than just being less than perfect)
And for a systematic exploration of demandingness and its limits (published in a top academic journal), see:
See my response to ScottâI think âobligatoryâ might have been a distracting word choice. Iâm not trying to make any claims about blame/âpraiseworthiness, including toward oneself for (not) acting.
The post is aimed at someone who sits down to do some moral reasoning, arrives at a conclusion thatâs not demanding (eg make a small donation), and feels the pull of taking that action. But when they reach a demanding conclusion (eg make a large donation), they donât think they should feel the same pull.
Fair enoughâI think I agree with that. Something that I discuss a lot in my writing is that we clearly have strong moral reasons to do more good rather than less, but that an over-emphasis on âobligationâ and âdemandsâ can get in the way of people appreciating this. I think Iâm basically channeling the same frustration that you have, but rather than denying that there is such a thing as âsupererogationâ, I would frame it as emphasizing that we obviously have really good reasons to do supererogatory things, and refusing to do so can even be a straightforward normative error. See, especially, What Permissibility Could Be, where I emphatically reject the ârationalistâ conception of permissibility on which we have no more reason to do supererogatory acts than selfish ones.
I basically agree with Scott. You need to ask what it even means to call something âobligatoryâ. For many utilitarians (from Sidgwick to Peter Singer), they mean nothing more than what you have most reason to do. But that is not what anyone else means by the term, which (as J.S. Mill better recognized) has important connections to blameworthiness. So then the question arises why you would think that anything less than perfection was automatically deserving of blame. You might just as well claim that anything better than maximal evil is thereby deserving of praise!
For related discussion, see my posts:
Deontic Pluralism (on different things that âoughtâ and âobligationâ can mean)
Imperfection is OK! (on how to think about our moral imperfection, and why we neednât feel bad about itâunless we do something far more egregious than just being less than perfect)
And for a systematic exploration of demandingness and its limits (published in a top academic journal), see:
Willpower Satisficing
Thanks for the links, Richard!
See my response to ScottâI think âobligatoryâ might have been a distracting word choice. Iâm not trying to make any claims about blame/âpraiseworthiness, including toward oneself for (not) acting.
The post is aimed at someone who sits down to do some moral reasoning, arrives at a conclusion thatâs not demanding (eg make a small donation), and feels the pull of taking that action. But when they reach a demanding conclusion (eg make a large donation), they donât think they should feel the same pull.
Fair enoughâI think I agree with that. Something that I discuss a lot in my writing is that we clearly have strong moral reasons to do more good rather than less, but that an over-emphasis on âobligationâ and âdemandsâ can get in the way of people appreciating this. I think Iâm basically channeling the same frustration that you have, but rather than denying that there is such a thing as âsupererogationâ, I would frame it as emphasizing that we obviously have really good reasons to do supererogatory things, and refusing to do so can even be a straightforward normative error. See, especially, What Permissibility Could Be, where I emphatically reject the ârationalistâ conception of permissibility on which we have no more reason to do supererogatory acts than selfish ones.