The Priest – Navigating Moral Burnout

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the historic basis for the concept of supererogation in ethics. A supererogatory act is one which goes beyond what moral duty requires of us. In the Vulgate Latin translation of Luke 10, when the Samaritan promises the innkeeper he will “pay anything over and above” what is needed to sustain the injured man, it is translated as quodcumque supererogaveris. This one detail has prompted centuries of debate, especially in duty-based ethical traditions, about how to understand the moral significance of acts which seem to exceed what morality requires.

In this lecture, we will approach these debates about supererogation from a somewhat unconventional angle. We will meditate on the figure of the priest, one of the two characters in the parable who attended to the injured man but was not moved to stop. We’ll consider the phenomenon of moral burnout, which occurs when a moral theory asks something of an agent which they find themselves unable to satisfy. We’ll consider whether those who fail to stop are guilty of suberogation or whether rather the problem lies with the excessive demandiness of the Samaritan love ethic.

We will survey three arguments against the Samaritan love ethic arising from three different threats of moral burnout: emotional exhaustion, loss of integrity, and ineptitude. Each type of moral burnout is driven by a distinctive feature of the Samaritan love ethic as we developed it in Lecture Two. I’ll defend the love ethic against these objections, in the process refining our understanding of the types of emotional vulnerability, attention and beneficence that this ethical framework requires. At the conclusion of the lecture, we’ll consider whether contemporary debates about supererogation in moral theory are poorly framed.

All are welcome to attend the lectures, but please register at: https://tinyurl.com/wildelectures3