You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

SilentCal comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Princess_Stargirl 09 December 2014 08:32AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (99)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: SilentCal 12 December 2014 08:12:17PM 0 points [-]

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.