Saturday, June 27, 2009

Trekkie word of the day: Supererogation


In the 2009 Star Trek film, young Spock is being quizzed by computers, and we hear him answer a question but do not hear the question he was answering.

His answer was, "When an act is morally praiseworthy but not morally obligatory."

And, in fact, there is a term in ethics for such acts: Supererogation (super-er-o-gay-shun), from the Latin meaning to pay out over and above. So the question must have been, "What is supererogation?" or words to that effect.

Now you know. :)
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2 Comments:

At June 28, 2009 8:59 PM , Blogger Mark said...

Haha, I love being a nerd! 8-|

 
At March 22, 2010 9:51 PM , Blogger Deep Space 9 said...

I had not seen the movie until renting it a month ago. Great movie! Nothing is left to chance in such movies and they gave us a partial phrase to tease us. Stanford U has a great write-up on Supererogation - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation

 

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