Supererogation for a Virtue Ethicist

The contemporary discussion of supererogation and how it fits within particular moral theories is strikingly thin when it comes to the question of whether or how virtue ethics can make room for supererogation. Indeed, whereas the debates about how utilitarianism and Kantianism ought approach the supererogatory are well-developed, although by no means exhaustive, to date there is but one article-length treatment of the topic of virtue ethics and supererogation. Given the above gap in the literature, the primary goal of this dissertation is to develop a satisfying account of supererogation that fits well within a virtue ethical framework. A second (and secondary) aim is related and enables the dissertation to make a modest contribution to the larger debate in moral philosophy about the relative strengths and weakness of the major moral theories. This second aim is to argue that the developed virtue ethics account is, as an account of the supererogatory, superior to the accounts of supererogation that have been offered on behalf of both Kantianism and utilitarianism. A third and minor aim is to show how virtue ethics can deepen our understanding of the supererogatory, shedding light on certain aspects of actual cases of supererogation that the contemporary discussion of the topic tends to miss. Chapter One provides an introduction to the concept of supererogation with a brief history of the academic discussion of it up to the present, introduces five 'central cases' of supererogation, argues for the import of the supererogatory, and offers an outline of the project. Chapters Two and Three assess some of the more prominent utilitarian (Chapter Two) and Kantian (Chapter Three) accounts of supererogation that appear in the literature. Chapter Four introduces and provides a defense a new virtue ethics account of supererogation. Chapter Five brings together the accounts of supererogation introduced and assessed in Chapters Two, Three, and Four for the purposes of determining how successful utilitarians, Kantians, and virtue ethicist have been at accounting for supererogation.