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I was think­ing about my pre­vi­ous boy­cotting mar­riage post some more, and I fig­ured out that this is a great chance to give a lit­tle ethics les­son on deon­tic ver­dicts.

“Deon­tic” just means some­thing like “related to duties.” In this case, we’re inter­ested in moral duties, as opposed to legal duties, or some other kind. Dif­fer­ent moral the­o­ries can be dis­tin­guished by what deon­tic ver­dicts they issue — that is, moral the­ory A might say that abor­tion is wrong, while moral the­ory B says abor­tion is some­times ok.

There are four basic classes of deon­tic ver­dict that a moral the­ory can issue on any given action.

1. Imper­mis­si­ble: If an action is morally imper­mis­si­ble, that means that you can­not do it, from the moral point of view. Syn­onyms for the imper­mis­si­ble cat­e­gory include “wrong” and “forbidden.”
2. Per­mis­si­ble: If an action is morally per­mis­si­ble, that means that you can do it, from the moral point of view. Syn­onyms include “right” and “optional.”
3. Oblig­a­tory: If an action is morally oblig­a­tory, that means that you must do it, from the moral point of view. Syn­onyms include “required” and “duty” (as in, “feed­ing your chil­dren is your duty”). Notice that “right” can be a syn­onym for both “per­mis­si­ble” and “oblig­a­tory.” When peo­ple say that some­thing is “right,” their state­ments are ambigu­ous, and we have to fig­ure out from the con­text whether they mean “per­mis­si­ble” or “oblig­a­tory.” For instance, if some­one says “gay mar­riage is right,” they prob­a­bly mean that, for any given cou­ple, gay mar­riage is morally per­mis­si­ble, not that it is morally obligatory.
4. Supereroga­tory: This word describes actions that go above and beyond what is morally required in a praise­wor­thy way. For instance, you prob­a­bly think the  acts of char­ity per­formed by Mother Theresa were supereroga­tory. But not all morally per­mis­si­ble actions are also supereroga­tory. For instance, eat­ing Lucky Charms instead of Golden Gra­hams for break­fast is per­mis­si­ble, but there’s noth­ing supereroga­tory about it.

Got all that? Great! So here’s the point I really wanted to make:

I pro­pose (ten­ta­tively!!) the moral prin­ci­ple that sym­bolic ges­tures of sol­i­dar­ity with dis­ad­van­taged, unlucky or oppressed groups of peo­ple are supereroga­tory. That means it’s great if you do them, but you’re not morally blame­wor­thy if you don’t. I sug­gested before that het­ero­sex­ual peo­ple post­pon­ing or even renounc­ing mar­riage in sup­port of their homo­sex­ual friends and neigh­bors is indeed a sym­bolic ges­ture (since their act in itself is unlikely to actu­ally change things). Het­ero­sex­ual peo­ple who don’t choose to engage in the sym­bolic ges­ture and who do marry (like me) are not vio­lat­ing a moral duty, but are merely opt­ing not to do the supereroga­tory thing.

Other pos­si­ble exam­ples of sym­bolic ges­tures of sol­i­dar­ity include those rub­ber Live­strong wrist­bands, wear­ing black to mourn the dead, and chang­ing your Twit­ter avatar green in sup­port of Iran­ian demon­stra­tors. These things are prob­a­bly supereroga­tory, but not morally obligatory.

Can any­one think of a coun­terex­am­ple to my prin­ci­ple that sym­bolic ges­tures of sol­i­dar­ity are supereroga­tory? You’d need to come up with a sit­u­a­tion in which a sym­bolic ges­ture does NOT seem supereroga­tory — either a sym­bolic ges­ture that seems to be morally imper­mis­si­ble or, on the other hand, a ges­ture that seems morally oblig­a­tory.

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