Reply to: Roberts

Abstract

In his critique of my views on supererogation, Rodney Roberts (Philosophia, 2014) claims that I treat care ethics as having a more general moral validity than other care ethicists do. He also claims that the kind of sentimentalism I espouse doesn’t sufficiently emphasize sentiment and then goes on to question what I say about supererogation. But in fact other care ethicists also think care ethics can cover the whole of morality, and my sentimentalism emphasizes sentiment just as much and as little as that paradigm sentimentalist Francis Hutcheson does. Further, the critique Roberts makes of my view on supererogation doesn’t allow for the full range of possible cases of supererogation.