On July 31, 1916, during the battle of the Somme in northern France, 26-year-old James Miller, a private in the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, “was ordered to take an important message under heavy shell and rifle fire and to bring back a reply at all costs. He was compelled to cross the open, and on leaving the trench was shot almost immediately in the back, the bullet coming out through his abdomen. In spite of this, with heroic courage and self-sacrifice, he compressed with his hand the gaping wound in his abdomen, delivered his message, staggered back with the answer and fell at the feet of the officer to whom he delivered it. He gave his life with a supreme devotion to duty.”
What do we make of this kind of behavior? The British military authorities during the First World War clearly considered Private Miller’s actions exceptional, even at a time when many extraordinary deeds were done daily, as he was awarded the Victoria Cross “for most conspicuous bravery” (the quotation above is taken from Miller’s official citation for the award). If Miller had crawled back into the trench immediately after taking the shot that would soon kill him, we would be hard put to blame him, or to say that he had acted wrongly or that his action was immoral. Like his commanding officers, we are surely more likely to judge that Miller’s actions went “beyond the call of duty” and that they deserve special praise. In short, we are likely to praise him for doing what he did but would not have blamed him had he acted differently.
“We may imagine a squad of soldiers to be practising the throwing of live hand grenades; a grenade slips from the hand of one of them and rolls on the ground near the squad; one of them sacrifices his life by throwing himself on the grenade and protecting his comrades with his own body … If the soldier had not thrown himself on the grenade, would he have failed in his duty? Though clearly he is superior in some way to his comrades, can we possibly say that they failed in their duty by not trying to be the one who sacrificed himself? If he had not done so, could anyone have said to him, ‘You ought to have thrown yourself on that grenade’?”
This story is told in “Saints and heroes,” an important 1958 paper by the British philosopher J.O. Urmson which has driven much recent philosophical debate over supererogatory acts. Urmson identifies three conditions that must be met for an act to count as supererogatory: it cannot be a matter of (ordinary) duty; it must be praiseworthy; and no blame should attach to its omission. All these criteria are clearly met in the above case, Urmson argues, which therefore qualifies as an act of heroism.
Supererogatory acts Our common intuitions apparently sit quite comfortably with this kind of assessment. It seems natural to view morality as a two-tiered affair. On one level, there are things that we are all morally required to do: basic obligations that are a matter of duty and set the minimum standard of ordinary morality. Often these are stated negatively, as obligations that we are wrong not to meet: do not lie, cheat, kill, etc. We are expected to meet them ourselves and expect others to do likewise.
In addition to these ordinary moral duties, there are, at a more elevated level, moral ideals. These are often expressed positively and may be open-ended: thus, while there is an ordinary moral duty not to steal from others, great generosity to others is an ideal that is in principle unlimited. Such an action may go beyond what is required by ordinary morality and falls into a category of so-called “supererogatory acts”—acts that are praiseworthy to perform but not blameworthy to omit. Supererogatory acts are the province of “heroes and saints.” Such people may consider these acts to be their duty and blame themselves if they fail to perform them, but this is essentially a personal sense of duty and others are not entitled to judge them in this way.
The idea of supererogatory actions highlights the personal aspect of morality. Heroes and saints have a personal sense of duty, of what it is right for them to do, and so choose to waive their right to exemptions such as danger or difficulty that most of us use to excuse our not performing such actions. Most forms of utilitarianism are rigidly impersonal, treating every life (including the agent’s) as of equal value in moral assessments, and tend to underestimate the importance of personal aims and commitments. These are often overridden when the utilitarian standard is used in reaching moral decisions, and to this extent utilitarianism is seen by some as giving a less-than-adequate account of agents’ personal priorities and sense of their own moral integrity.
Can good actions be optional? This category of extraordinary, nonobligatory moral actions is philosophically interesting precisely because of the difficulties that some ethical systems have in accommodating it. Such systems typically form some conception of what is good and then define what is right and what is wrong by reference to this standard. The idea that something is acknowledged to be good and yet is not required may then be hard to explain.
According to, at least in its more straightforward versions, (see The experience machine), an action is good if it increases general utility (e.g. happiness) and the best action in any situation is the one that produces most utility. Giving most of your money in charitable donations to developing countries would not usually be regarded as a moral obligation; others might praise you for doing it, but would not feel bad about themselves if they did not follow suit. In other words, charity on such a lavish scale is supererogatory. Yet, looking at it from the utilitarian perspective, if such an action promotes general utility (which it very likely would), how can it not be the required thing to do? Supererogatory acts are problematic for Kantian ethics too. Kant places the highest value on moral agency itself (see The categorical imperative). Once this is accepted, how can there be any limit on what is done that may enhance or facilitate that agency?
Conflicts of this kind between ethical theories and our ordinary moral sense are damaging, especially for the former. Radical utilitarians might maintain (and some do) that we should accept the full implications of their theory—in effect, denying that any actions can be supererogatory—and alter our ways of life accordingly. But such extreme reformist proposals, which go against the grain of ordinary morality and mark most of us down as moral failures, are certain to alienate more people than they win over. More often, theorists attempt to explain or play down the apparent conflicts. A common strategy is to appeal to some form of exemption or excuse (for instance, abnormal difficulty or danger) which allows a person not to perform some action that would otherwise be obligatory. If this move gets a given theory off the hook, it certainly does so at a cost. For personal factors are introduced, upsetting the universality that is usually regarded as indispensable in the moral realm (see The Golden Rule). Another approach is to introduce ideas such as the doctrine of double effect and the act-omission distinction (see Acts and omissions) to explain how it can be right to follow one path when another, apparently preferable one, is available. But these ideas are not themselves without difficulty, and in any case many will feel that the plausibility of a theory is diminished if it is heavily burdened with footnotes and other qualifications.
the condensed idea
Should we all be heroes?
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.AD30 | The golden rule |
| c.1260 | Acts and omissions |
| 1739 | Hume’s guillotine |
| 1781 | The categorical imperative |
| 1785 | Ends and means |
| 1958 | Beyond the call of duty |
| 1974 | The experience machine |