Disjunctive duties and supererogatory sets of actions

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77:67-86 (2015)
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Abstract

I develop a ‘duty-plus’ approach to supererogation based on a simple intuition: if I am required to do x or y, doing x and y is a candidate for, though not necessarily, supererogation. This is an appealing view to take, located midway between two extreme positions, supererogationism and rigorism. I give a precise statement of the view through the notion of disjunctive duties, and discuss the commitments a duty-plus theorist should make, independent from the Kantian context in which this position is often discussed. I also advocate the novel claim that we should take supererogation as a property of sets of actions, rather than single actions. The latter view suffers from problems in cases of concurrent acts and accumulative supererogation.

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Author's Profile

Matthias Brinkmann
Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München

Citations of this work

Must We Be Perfect?: A Case Against Supererogation.Megan Fritts & Calum Miller - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63.

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References found in this work

Kantian Ethics and Supererogation.Marcia Baron - 1987 - Journal of Philosophy 84 (5):237.
Supererogation and rules.Joel Feinberg - 1960 - Ethics 71 (4):276-288.

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