Better but Wrong: Assessing Conflicts Between the Deontic and the Evaluative

Abstract In recent work, Benjamin Ferguson and Sebastian Köhler take interest in the claim that permissible acts are always morally better than impermissible acts ( bop ). They argue that bop is both commonsensical and supported by powerful theoretical considerations. They then present a series of cases in which common moral claims appear to conflict with bop . In this paper, I first show that some of the conflicts Ferguson and Köhler identify are merely apparent, as they arise only given theoretical commitments regarding the value of actions that supporters of the relevant claims can and do reject. In the second half of the paper, I address two other cases Ferguson and Köhler discuss. I argue that the conflicts with bop in these cases are genuine, but also to be expected, because these cases involve supererogation, and our best theories of supererogation are in tension with Ferguson and Köhler’s case for bop .