A Defense of the Cautionary Approach to Supererogation

Abstract

How can moral theory make room for the existence of acts that are beyond the call of duty? This issue has become known as the problem of supererogation, and philosophers have provided various accounts of how to solve it. We have provided a recent answer to this question that draws on the work of the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Abū Alī Miskawayh and holds that we can make sense of supererogatory actions by appealing to a form of moral caution. In a recent response to this article, Alireza Kazemi argues that this cautionary account cannot explain the existence of supererogatory acts. In this short reply, we defend the cautionary account against Kazemi’s criticisms. We start by briefly outlining our cautionary account and Kazemi’s criticisms before providing our own arguments as to why the cautionary account should not be rejected.