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Offence and Virtue Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gregory Mellema
Gregory Mellema*
Affiliation:
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, 49506, USA
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Extract

In his 1963 essay ‘Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics,’ Roderick Chisholm describes a category of human acts which he calls ‘offences’:

A system of moral concepts which provides a place for what is good but not obligatory, should also provide a place for what is bad but not forbidden. For if there is such a thing as “non-obligatory well-doing” then it is plausible to suppose that there is also such a thing as “permissive ill-doing.” There is no term in moral literature, so far as I know, which has been used to designate just this latter class of actions; I shall refer to them as “offences.”

Some recognize the possibility of acts, commonly called acts of supererogation, which are morally good or praiseworthy but not obligatory to perform. In this passage, as well as in a later article co-authored with Ernest Sosa, Chisholm calls attention to the possibility of acts which are morally bad or blameworthy to perform, but whose performance is nevertheless not forbidden.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 323 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 Chisholm, Roderick ‘Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics,’ Ratio 5 (1963) 5Google Scholar

2 Chisholm, Roderick and Sosa, Ernest ‘Intrinsic Preferability and the Problem of Supererogation,’ Synthese 16 (1966) 321-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In characterizing the concept of supererogation it is customary to stipulate, in addition, that an act of supererogation is not blameworthy to omit. Similarly, one might wish to stipulate that an act of offence is not praiseworthy to omit (for more on this matter, see my ‘Quasi-Supererogation,’ Philosophical Studies 52 (1987) 141-50). For the purpose of this essay, I will ignore these additional stipulations.

3 Chisholm, ‘The Ethics of Requirement,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964) 152Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Knut, Tranoy ‘Asymmetry in Ethics,’ Inquiry 10 (1967), 351Google Scholar, and Donagan, Alan The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977) 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The best such discussion is Gregory, Trianosky’s ‘Supererogation, Wrongdoing, and Vice: On the Autonomy of the Ethics of Virtue,’ Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986) 26Google Scholar-40.

6 John Stuart, Mill Utilitarianism (London: Longmans, Green 1907) 74Google Scholar. Mill refers to these duties (as does Kant) as ‘imperfect duties.’ But he nowhere states that imperfect duties are limited to duties to practice virtue or resist vice. Thus, I shall assume that some duties of a non-aretaic nature may likewise take this form. For more on this point see my ‘Supererogation and the Fulfillment of Duty,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry 25 (1991) 167-75.

7 Strictly speaking, my argument can be formulated without making an explicit reference to moral vices if one acknowledges such duties as the duty not to perform an unreasonable number of rude actions. Some might be skeptical about reducing duties to avoid vice to non-aretaic duties in such a manner as this, and some might be uncomfortable acknowledging duties which contain a term as vague as ‘unreasonable number.’ For this reason I have not attempted to base my argument upon the assumption that there are such non-aretaic duties. Moreover, it can be argued that duties of this sort nevertheless make implicit reference to aretaic concepts.

8 I am indebted to two anonymous referees of this Journal for criticisms and advice.