Moral Saints Reconsidered.

Abstract

Some people do far more than morality requires: consider the doctor who travels to a remote or dangerous area to treat the sick. I offer an account of what these “moral saints” look like and argue that their behavior influences the moral obligations faced by the rest of us. According to Susan Wolf’s prominent account, moral saints are necessarily unattractive—dull-witted, bland, obsessive—and thus unworthy as personal ideals. I argue that this view renders saints self-defeating and relies on an unfounded moralization of nonmoral character traits. I then show that a distinction between two types of moral motivation bears on whether moral saints appear unattractive. An agent can be motivated directly by the features that make an act morally right (rightness de re), or instead by some abstract notion of “morality” itself (rightness de dicto). Moral saints appear unattractive only when we make the mistake of assuming they must be motivated by the abstract notion at the expense of the right-making features. I then argue that moral saints ratchet-up our moral obligations by providing the rest of us with a crucial sort of evidence about what it is like to perform morally extraordinary actions, and by extension obligatory actions. Moral obligation is at its core a matter of what we can reasonably demand of one another. One cannot be obligated to perform an action that it would be reasonable to believe is an unbearable sacrifice. Moral saints generate evidence about how much sacrifice is involved in performing actions at the boundaries of obligation. I argue that in the context of moral obligation, a “sacrifice” is a gross loss of well-being, defined agent-neutrally. As our stock of evidence expands, justified ignorance is reduced, thus removing a defeater of obligations. In seeing that actions with a high degree of sacrifice are not unbearably burdensome, we infer that actions with significantly lower degrees of sacrifice are even less burdensome. This knowledge makes those lesser actions obligatory.