Abstract
The soldier who
throws herself upon a grenade in order to save the lives of her comrades is
surely to be commended for her selfless act. While most moral theories do not
require an agent to make such a sacrifice, nearly every ethical theorist lauds
such behaviour as a paradigm case of beneficence. Daniel Guevara, by contrast,
argues that Kant cannot account for the moral worth of supererogatory acts. In
this essay, I shall examine Guevara’s criticism of Kant’s seeming inability to
account for the beneficence of supererogatory acts, and argue that, despite
surface appearances, Kantian deontology does not categorically dismiss the
moral worth of every supererogatory act.
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