Hey folks, as many of you know, each week I write and record a note for cafe insiders.

Sometimes my notes are about breaking legal and political news.

Other times there are personal reflections on subjects that I find especially moving.

I'm excited to share my most recent note, above and beyond, with listeners of Stay Tuned.

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That's cafe.com slash insider and the code is justice.

Now onto my note.

Dear listener, since law school, I have made it a goal to strip my writing and speech of unnecessarily fancy, obscure and multisolabic words.

Speak and write as simply as possible.

Don't send readers scurrying for the dictionary, like writer George Will does, as I once could naturally criticize him on the Stay Tuned podcast.

I'm going to violate that resolution here, because a couple of especially fancy seven syllable words have been banging around in my brain this past week.

Terms I played with and whose meaning I explored in the academic abstract, way back in college, when studying moral philosophy.

They are the adjective super erogatory and its noun counterpart, super errogation.

Despite the sound of it, the latter has nothing to do with the watering of crops.

The words may be fancy, but the concept is straightforward.

Super errogation, premoral philosophers and ethicists, is the performance of an act above what duty calls for.

It is good, but not morally required.

It is worthy of praise, but its non-performance is not a cause for criticism.

A super erogatory act is morally optional, but is typically impressive and tends to involve some sacrifice or hardship for the person who performs it.

As an ethical matter, the notion of super errogation calls into question the adequacy of legal and moral codes generally,

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