Mark L Ornelas

Supererogatory actions pose a longstanding challenge to Kantian moral theory, which traditionally holds that only actions done from duty have moral worth. While recent accounts attempt to preserve weak supererogation within Kant’s framework via imperfect duties, strong supererogation remains marginalized as merely “quasi-moral.” This paper argues that strong supererogatory actions can be understood to have genuine Kantian moral worth. Building on McCarty’s (1989) sublimity approach and drawing on §59–60 of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, I propose an aesthetic account in which the sublime and the beautiful serve as symbolic representations of the moral law. I argue that moral feeling, grounded in a well-trained good will, enables recognition of such actions as morally valuable. This aesthetic approach restores strong supererogation to its proper moral status by demonstrating that the moral feeling elicited by sublime acts reflects genuine respect for the moral law, thus granting them full Kantian moral worth.

Cultural influences are pervasive throughout human behaviour, and as human–robot interactions become more common, roboticists are increasingly focusing attention on how to build robots that are culturally competent and culturally sustainable. The current treatment of culture in robotics, however, is largely limited to the definition of culture as national culture. This is problematic for three reasons: it ignores subcultures, it loses specificity and hides the nuances in cultures, and it excludes refugees and stateless persons. We propose to shift the focus of cultural robotics to redefine culture as an emergent phenomenon. We make use of three research programmes in the social and cognitive sciences to justify this definition. Consequently, cultural behaviour cannot be explicitly programmed into a robot, rather, a robot must be designed with the capability to participate in the interactions that lead to the arising of cultural behaviour. In the final part of the paper, we explore which capacities and abilities are the most salient for a robot to do this.