For David Heyd (ed.), Springer handbook on supererogation philosophical boggle" (1993: 131, emphasis added). Nor can we define our way out of more recent boggles, like Horton's (2017) All or Nothing Problem.How do philosophers try to solve the paradoxes of supererogation? In recent decades, most attempts have drawn on one and the same source: the theory of reasons for action. 3 And so we find a flurry of distinctions between kinds of reasons: agent-relative vs. agent-neutral (Dancy 1993), perfect vs. imperfect (Portmore 2011), requiring vs. justifying vs. favoring (Archer 2016; Horgan and Timmons 2010; Little and Macnamara 2017, 2020; Tucker forthcoming), and on the list goes. By mixing and matching varieties, and by linking them to other concepts like permissibility and value, ethicists have tried to make sense of supererogation.This chapter provides a tour of some of the main paradoxes of supererogation, as well as the main solutions provided by reasons-ologists. We end with a twist: the paradoxes of supererogation cannot be solved with reasons alone. Supererogation, we think, is a counterexample to the "Reasons First" program, which tries to reduce ethics to the study of reasons.None of our arguments, by the way, will turn on the definition of "supererogation." That said, a definition will come in handy. Since we are here to talk about the classic paradox and its descendents, we will define "supererogation" as the thing that the paradox is meant to rule out: supererogatory acts are optional and better than a permissible alternative. Of course, we are talking about morality here, so we mean that supererogation is morally better than a morally permissible alternative. As for "reason," we can use it in the familiar way: to be a reason is to count in favor of 3 Some philosophers, especially old-school consequentialists, do see supererogation as intolerably paradoxical (see, e.g., Kagan 1984Kagan , 1989. But this view has its costs. "In commonsense moral reasoning, we take it for granted that there are supererogatory acts, and it would be incredible if the very idea of supererogation turned out to be incoherent" (Dreier 2004: 145). some way of acting, making it more choiceworthy, or in other words, making it a better thing to do. 4 Reasons, so understood, may not be enough to solve the paradoxes of supererogation.We begin with the classic paradox.
The Classic ParadoxWhy does supererogation feel paradoxical? Or to put it another way, why would anyone worry that heroic sacrifices and kindly favors might turn out to be obligatory? Let's start with a textbook case of an obligatory act. Consider:
Scarce DrugYou own a scarce drug, which you can use either to save your acquaintance Alex, who needs it all to survive, or five others, who need only a fifth each. (Foot 1967) Most people think you have to save the five, other things being equal. 5 Saving one life is good; saving five is better still; and so, people infer that you have to save the five.Behind this easy inference looms a principle: that we have to do the be...
