Caution and supererogation: a reply to Eslami and Archer

Abstract Seyyed Mohsen Eslami and Alfred Archer have argued for what they call the cautionary account of supererogation. According to this account, an action is supererogatory iff it involves exercising caution in doing the right thing in cases where the agent's self-interest gets into conflict with the interests of others. They argue that further to be interesting in its own right, this account can solve some problems that bedevil other accounts. In this note, I argue that caution cannot explain supererogation. The main reason is that we can plausibly speak about required, forbidden, and supererogatory caution. Therefore, caution cannot be what makes some actions supererogatory. I also show that we can think about cases where we intuitively have supererogation without the presumed caution.