Acts are often judged by moral philosophers to fall into two categories; permissible acts and obligatory acts. That which is permissible is that which is okay to do, like eating ice cream. That which is obligatory is that which one must do, like keep promises {all else held equal}. This framework makes no prima facie distinction between acts and omissions. The permissibility of eating ice cream is the same kind of permissibility of not eating ice cream, the obligation to keep your promises is the same type of obligation as the obligation not to commit arbitrary acts of cruelty. Despite that not eating ice cream, and not being cruel, concern acts untaken.

While people are likely to agree that there are things you can do and things you must do, that classification is not granular enough to be lived by. Other categories may be suggested. A common one concerns going above and beyond, so called “supererogation”. This is an act which is praiseworthy, excellent, esteemed, but not obligatory. The canonical example, from Urmson’s “Saints and Heroes” (1958) is diving onto a grenade to save one’s comrades in a battle. The choice to do such a thing is exalted, and is called a supererogatory act.

Nevertheless, in order for an act to count as supererogatory, it must be classified as a choice. If that same soldier was threatened, with the certain outcome, that his family would be shot if he did not sacrifice himself for the good of his fellows, his action would be seen as coerced in some sense. And that coercion, rightly, monstrous. Giving up all of one’s material wealth to a charity is another example, laudable if someone does it willingly, monstrous if they are compelled to do so at gunpoint. Regardless of how laudable the soldier or the saint’s actions are, the state of things which compels them to behave in that way consigns such sainthood to the dustbin of the tragic.

What I want to consider in this discussion is precisely that sense of monstrosity. Applying an obligation to go above and beyond, requiring people to act in an exalted fashion. I will call a state of things which requires people to go above and beyond monstrous.

I have not specified the scope of “state of things” intentionally, as the scope of moral evaluation simpliciter is as broad as all possible actions of collections of humans. The decision to commit a vengeful murder of a charity worker is an immoral one, whether that murder is attributed to a dictator, their firing squad, or the institutions which compel such acts.

Moreover, in my prior discussion, I had construed a compulsion for someone to act in a supererogatory fashion in exclusively coercive terms, namely with the threat of violence. I think this assumption can be relaxed to a broader sense of compulsion. In that regard, an ideology which compels people toward acts of supererogation, to each person’s detriment, would also be monstrous. I will pause to consider that.

The first thing to note is that the scope of moral evaluation concerns collections of moral agents and their properties – the political rule which forces the execution of a noble charity worker is as unjust as the act of execution. An ideology can be considered as a composite of such rules, both explicit and implicit. In that regard, if we would like to judge a political rule as placing requirements on people, we would then need to be able to judge an ideology as equally capable of placing such requirements.
That then allows us to consider under what conditions an ideology could be considered monstrous, insofar as it places requirements on people to do the supererogatory. While the course of the previous discussion had particular agents’ acts construed as monstrous or not, it is difficult to say an ideology is culpable in the same manner that a moral agent would be for a monstrous act, simply because it is not an agent in the same sense that a human is. Can it count as a doer of evil if it isn’t a human?

I believe this is a false question, while an ideology isn’t an agent, neither are political rules or laws, and we judge their moral value by the acts which they engender. A law which enables hiring discrimination will be considered unjust to the extent it allows people to act in accordance with its principles. I thus believe it’s appropriate to consider an ideology monstrous when its constitutive principles require acts of supererogation. A system of belief functioning as a gun to everyone’s head, compelling them to give all of their worldly possessions away, is monstrous in the same manner as any particular threat that functions the same way.

It is then important to consider the nature of the compulsions that an ideology may place upon a person. The compulsion cannot be considered a literal gun to a head, as ideas cannot hold weapons. It must thus be a belief held in a manner that strongly constrains someone’s actions. While the psychological origins of such a belief are important to consider in any particular case, the nature of such a belief as a strong constrainer of someone’s actions is the operative principle that allows that belief’s containing ideology to be judged as monstrous.

How strongly someone’s actions are constrained by the state of things is a continuum. A strong constraint on actions will be present when people can be reasonably and predominantly expected to fall in accord with the constraint. For this part of the discussion, it is granted that a person can practically choose to obey or disobey the constraint placed upon them, and they must be aware of the constraint. In that sense, a person can choose to disobey an order given at gunpoint, and then be shot. If they were unaware of the gun held to their head, they would not count as making a coerced choice in this sense, since they are simply not offered the choice to obey or disobey. On one end of the continuum are the strongest constraints – if you do not act in accordance with the principle, something will be ruined. This might be your death, the death of loved ones, the end of a civilization… On the other end, are mild inconveniences – your tap water might be a bit too warm to enjoy drinking for a day. In order for an ideology to serve as a compulsion, the threat its principles present need not be actualized, only the belief that the threatened action will occur is required.

Generically ideologies are followed without the constant awareness of what violating their principles will engender. People believe that promises must be kept without specific knowledge of the result of breaking any particular promise. Someone can then be compelled to act in accordance with an ideology by its inherent normative force, rather than the threat of violating it. A conception of being required to follow a norm cannot terminate in awareness of an underlying specific threat that violating that norm would cause – generically we believe that following a principle is right, wrong, okay, justified, understandable etc. without awareness of precisely why and what the results are. We are thus compelled to act in the manner we do through a more nebulous sense of awareness of the ideologies we inhabit. While we are aware that bad things will happen if the vague principles of the society we live in are violated too much, we act in accordance with those rules without any specific threat being given. The sense of requirement placed upon agents by an ideology must then not terminate in awareness of any specific action, and more broadly it concerns an immersion and identification of an agent with the social milieu of that ideology.

Most people follow most norms of the society they live in, and thus a strong constraint on people’s actions should be inferred. The nature of this strong constraint must therefore be different from the awareness of violating such a constraint yielding ruin and horror. The absence of awareness of a specific threat construes the strong constraints which explain our collective compliance to an implicit social order as rendering it practically impossible to behave otherwise. Which is not to say impossible to behave otherwise, but very unreasonable to expect from anyone given the state of things. If it becomes reasonable to expect people to violate constitutive norms of the ideology of their social milieu, that ideology {or its social milieu’s} days are numbered, as when people expect themselves to act in discord with a principle the principle is simply no longer collectively enacted or believed.
The cohesion of a society, in a particular form, demands a regularity of collective action that places strong constraints on an individual’s imagination of, and desire to enact, ways to live otherwise. This is a form of practical impossibility - the practical impossibility of living otherwise saturates any society that is capable of sustaining itself long-term.

While that speaks to practical impossibility of acting otherwise in the aggregate, that does not provide a measure of when someone’s actions are constrained by an impossibility of that sort. Someone will tend to be acting in this manner when it is difficult for them to imagine living in a style which is contrary to the state of things. Whether that is because of inherent logistical difficulties in what is imagined, the difficulties of imagining it, or incompetence on the part of the imaginer is irrelevant, all that matters is the impediment to imagine.

Notably, what might be called our moral imagination is decoupled from considerations of practical possibility. Which is to say that it’s relatively easy to imagine how things might be better, how things might be worse, what is exalted or what is inconsiderate, regardless of how these things may be achieved, or whether they can be in the first place. The nebulous hope for “world peace” is a noble hope to have, even if it is a manifestation of the moral imagination. We aspire to the heights of our moral imagination, even when achieving those heights is practically impossible.

The air of naivety that surrounds decontextualized hope, for “world peace” or “end world hunger”, occurs in part because it marks the decoupling of the moral imagination from the state of things. The state of things makes it prohibitively difficult to achieve the heights of moral imagination, and as was seen before, prohibitively difficult to imagine living in a manner which achieves those heights.

The norms that enable the cohesion of society in its current form may be just or unjust. Challenging a particular one may unravel an institution – every suffragette and rebel slave acted in accordance with what is right for humanity as a whole, even if the conditions prior to their actions rendered it practically impossible for them to come to fruition. Indeed, the mark of such transformative collective acts is to make what is practically impossible become practically possible, and thus undermine the horrors inherent in the social fabric.

Systemic issues that require unjust differentials of power totally saturate our societies and institutions. Every person will have realized that things can be better even if they don’t know how to go about achieving that. Or even if they believe it’s not practically possible that the world be set more to right. Our moral imaginations compel us to rise to the heights of our halos. To attempt to bring about the practically impossible when it is right to do so. A consistent failure to make the practically impossible practically possible marks the irrelevance of someone’s moral imagination to their life. That things can always be imagined better is an inherent feature of human life, and that there will be systemic issues an inherent feature of human societies. The distinction in operating principles between the world of our moral imaginations and the one we live in will exist so long as what is imagined is not real.

The failure to make the practically impossible become possible is more than reasonable to expect. Our moral aspirations are typically marked by failure, we do not live in ways that will bring about the better world we imagine. While this is correct, appealing to the inherent mismatch of ideals with reality is a cop out, and serves as an explanation for any impermissible act consistent with the operative principles of a society that allows it. Which is to say, it exculpates any moral evil imaginable. A principle that exculpates any moral evil is, definitively, evil. But to act otherwise towards any systemic issue is to act contrary to the confines of the practically possible.

Therein lies the rub, if one sacrifices one’s moral imagination against systemic injustice on the altar of practicality, one exculpates all evils. But if one believes that we are required not to forsake it, one believes in an ideology that requires the supererogatory of humans, and is thus monstrous.

The perennial condition of humanity and our societies will embed the horrors of injustice in the operative principles of any society, and thus each person faces a choice between whether they allow themselves a way to exculpate arbitrary evil or commit themselves to the inherent monstrosity of human life. We face the choice between allowing devilry or requiring the angelic, and humanity falls off this tightrope of right action either way.