In this chapter, I first review some important recent empirical work on moral heroes. The emerging picture helps fill in some gaps left from the jettisoning of virtue, and prepares the way to handle another explanatory task with respect to moral heroism which occupies the rest of the chapter. This explanatory task concerns the fact that moral heroes have an uncanny knack for taking a different view of their feats than the one the rest of us customarily take: whereas we see their heroic acts as extraordinary, beyond the call of duty, a frightful choice, they often describe it as what anyone would have done, as required of them, as something they had no choice but to do. I call this contention, made variously by Holocaust rescuers, civilian first responders, and organ donors, among others, the ‘Non-Optionality Claim.’

I canvas three approaches to understanding the Non-Optionality Claim: a deflationary approach that dismisses the non-optionality claim as something akin to false modesty, a moral interpretation that casts the non-optionality claim as an authoritative articulation of moral duty, and a virtue approach that cites the exercise of ordinary virtue in extraordinary circumstances. I elaborate an alternative that deploys Bernard Williams’s notion of practical necessity.