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nydwracu comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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My view, and a lot of other people here seem to also be getting at this, is that the demandingness objection comes from a misuse of utilitarianism. People want their morality to label things 'permissible' and 'impermissible', and utilitarianism doesn't natively do that. That is, we want boolean-valued morality. The trouble is, Bentham went and gave us a real-valued one. The most common way to get a bool out of that is to label the maximum 'true' and everything else false, but that doesn't give a realistically human-followable result. Some philosophers have worked on 'satisficing consequentialism', which is a project to design a better real-to-bool conversion, but I think the correct answer is to learn to use real-valued morality.
There's some oversimplification above (I suspect people have always understood non-boolean morality in some cases), but I think it captures the essential problem.
A useful word here is "supererogation", but this still implies that there's a baseline level of duty, which itself implies that it's possible even in principle to calculate a baseline level of duty.
There may be cultural reasons for the absence of the concept: some Catholics have said that Protestantism did away with supererogation entirely. My impression is that that's a one-line summary of something much more complex (though possibly with potential toward the realization of the one-line summary), but I don't know much about it.
Supererogation was part of the moral framework that justified indulgences. The idea was that the saints and the church did lots of stuff that was above and beyond the necessary amounts of good (and God presumably has infinitely deep pockets if you're allowed to tap Him for extra), and so they had "credit left over" that could be exchanged for money from rich sinners.
The protestants generally seem to have considered indulgences to be part of a repugnant market and in some cases made explicit that the related concept of supererogation itself was a problem.
In Mary at the Foot of the Cross 8: Coredemtion as Key to a Correct Understanding of Redemption on page 389 there is a quick summary of a Lutheran position, for example:
The setting of the "zero point" might in some sense be arbitrary... a matter of mere framing. You could frame it as people already all being great, but with the option to be better. You could frame it as having some natural zero around the point of not actively hurting people and any minor charity counting as a bonus. In theory you could frame it as everyone being terrible monsters with a minor ability to make up a tiny part of their inevitable moral debt. If it is really "just framing" then presumably we could fall back to sociological/psychological empiricism, and see which framing leads to the best outcomes for individuals and society.
On the other hand, the location of the zero level can be absolutely critical if we're trying to integrate over a function from now to infinity and maximize the area under the curve. SisterY's essay on suicide and "truncated utility functions" relies on "being dead" having precisely zero value for an individual, and some ways of being alive having a negative value... in these cases the model suggests that suicide and/or risk taking can make a weird kind of selfish sense.
If you loop back around to the indulgence angle, one reading might be that if someone sins then they are no longer perfectly right with their local community. In theory, they could submit to a little extra hazing to prove that they care about the community despite transgressing its norms. In this case, the natural zero point might be "the point at which they are on the edge of being ostracized". If you push on that, the next place to look for justifications would focus on how ostracism and unpersoning works, and perhaps how it should work to optimize for whatever goals the community nominally or actually exists to achieve.
I have my own pet theories about how to find "natural zeros" in value systems, but this comment is already rather long :-P
I think my favorite insight from the concept of supererogation is the idea that carbon offsets are in some sense "environmental indulgences", which I find hilarious :-)
Please, do tell, that sounds very interesting.
It seems to me that systems that put "zero point" very high rely a lot on something like extrinsic motivation, whereas systems that put "zero point" very low rely mostly on intrinsic motivation.
In addition to that, if you have 1000 euros, and you desperately need to have 2000 and you play a game where you have to bet on a result of a coin toss, then you maximize your probability of ever reaching that sum by going all in. Whereas if you have 1000 and need to stay above 500, then you place your bets as conservatively as possible. Perhaps putting zero very high encourages "all in" moral gambles, encouraging unusual acts that might have high variance of moral value (if they succeed to achieve high moral value, they are called heroic acts)? Perhaps putting zero very low encourages playing conservatively, doing a lot of small acts instead of one big heroic act.
The word may have fallen out of favor, but I think the concept of "good, but not required" is alive and well in almost all folk morality. It's troublesome for (non-divine-command) philosophical approaches because you have to justify the line between 'obligation' and 'supererogation' somehow. I suspect the concept might sort of map onto a contractarian approach by defining 'obligatory' as 'society should sanction you for not doing it' and 'supererogatory' as 'good but not obligatory', though that raises as many questions as it answers.