• Show Notes

Dear Reader,

Since law school, I have made it a goal to strip my writing and speech of unnecessarily fancy, obscure, and multisyllabic words. Speak and write as simply as possible; don’t send readers scurrying for the dictionary, like writer George Will does, as I once good-naturedly criticized him on the Stay Tuned podcast.

I’m going to violate that resolution here because a couple of particularly fancy seven-syllable words have been banging around in my brain this past week, terms I played with and whose meaning I explored, in the academic abstract, way back in college when studying moral philosophy. They are the adjective “supererogatory” and its noun counterpart “supererogation.” Despite the sound of it, the latter has nothing to do with the watering of crops.

The words may be fancy but the concept is straightforward. Supererogation, per moral philosophers and ethicists, is the performance of an act above what duty calls for; it is good but not morally required; it is worthy of praise, but its non-performance is not a cause for criticism. A supererogatory act is morally optional, but is typically impressive and tends to involve some sacrifice or hardship for the person who performs it. As an ethical matter, the notion of supererogation calls into question the adequacy of legal and moral codes generally, lays bare the limits of the law and the strict requirements of duty. Some, especially those of certain religious traditions, ask the question: if something is morally praiseworthy, why should it not be morally required?