The second applied context in which I explore the implications of my view of moral heroism is in public practices of honoring and commemoration. Moral heroism is far from the only thing we honor and commemorate, but it is a common ground on which to think honoring and commemorating are appropriate or even called for. Yet what we understand ourselves to be honoring, the purposes for which we commemorate, as well as how we set about these activities are all subject to important revisions if my view of moral heroism is accepted. In particular, my view supports a broad shift away from honoring moral heroes and toward honoring moral achievements instead: it favors achievement admiration over characterological admiration. Engaging with the recently exploding literature concerning moral reservations about commemorations including statues, monuments, and the like, I distill two focal concerns about commemorations: They unjustly marginalize, and they mark inappropriate moral aspirations. I then show how the revisions supported by my view of moral heroism are both helpful in attenuating ongoing controversies surrounding practices of commemoration and productive in advancing the aims of honoring and commemorating moral excellence.

This chapter develops a view that casts moral heroism as a specific kind of moral achievement and argues it is superior to the virtue approach to moral heroism. I begin the discussion with J. O. Urmson’s account of moral heroism as overcoming fear, registering the limitations of that account before moving on to Gwen Bradford’s account of achievement as such, which centers on overcoming difficulty. She defends a view of difficulty that consists in the expending of effort, rather than in the surmounting of complexity. Her highly developed account is a good model for analyzing moral achievement, yet it is in need of significant modification in order to function in a specifically moral context. In order to give an account of moral achievement, I argue that Bradford’s key notion of difficulty should be replaced by sacrifice. Moral heroism consists in making high-stakes sacrifices. I develop an account of what sacrificing consists in, identifying features of actions that constitute sacrifices. I show how this concept offers us an account of moral heroism as a kind of moral achievement. I then argue that it significantly outperforms the virtue approach according to the desiderata from Chapter 2: accuracy, related phenomenon, and fitting responses.

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.

This chapter offers a brief review of the central arguments of the book, summed up in a theme of decentering the moral hero in my account of moral heroism. Refocusing our admiration and commemoration more neatly around achievements rather than achievers, positioning exemplarity in moral education as pedagogically promising when the figure of the hero isn’t the centerpiece of moral excellence, and opting for moral heroism as an achievement consisting in sacrificing rather than a state of character are all, among other things, ways of nudging the figure of the hero toward the periphery in my account of moral heroism. I embrace this elevation of action appraisal over person appraisal when it comes to moral heroism. This is not to say that the figure of the hero drops out entirely or fails to be of interest, however. I conclude by noting some possible directions of future work.

This chapter develops the case against the dominant view of moral heroism, which I call the ‘virtue approach.’ It posits moral virtues in moral heroes which play a pivotal role in every phase of how we understand and respond to moral heroism. On this view, the virtues of moral heroes are what explain their extraordinary behavior, and what set them apart from the rest of us. Moral virtues are what moral heroes offer to us as we attempt to learn from them and emulate them. It is the virtues of moral heroes that make them fit and useful as components in programs in moral education. And the virtue of the hero is what attracts our admiration, what calls out for honor and commemoration.

I introduce three theoretical desiderata for a theory of moral heroism: accuracy, related phenomena, and fitting responses. The arguments of this chapter target accuracy, showing that the virtue approach misunderstands moral heroism. Many moral heroes are poor candidates for virtue, and the patterns by which we draw inferences about virtue and moral heroism align poorly. We need a different approach to capture the significance and nature of moral heroism.

Moral heroism without virtue has implications for applied contexts, such as moral education. In this context, moral heroes have featured prominently in well-developed programs of character education. My view of moral heroism raises some problems for the design and implementation of such programs, not least because of the way that virtue thinking is embedded in them. After articulating several of those problems, I go on to explore directions in which my view might push us to reform our approaches to moral education, including by salvaging what may be salvaged from programs of character education. Recent studies in psychology provide some reason to think that approachable exemplars are more effective in motivating positive moral change than extraordinary exemplars. My view of moral heroism helps make the approachability of moral heroes more visible than the virtue approach, because it does not cast moral heroes as exemplars of hard-won virtues, but instead depicts moral heroism as an achievement that often comes amid a background of non-achievement. I suggest this is an encouraging data point for thinking that my view of moral heroism can supply an understanding of moral heroes that is not only theoretically rich and psychologically accurate but also educationally useful.

This chapter begins by introducing a collection of cases culled from relevant academic sources. These include rescuers in the Holocaust of WWII, towering figures of great renown, like Mahatma Gandhi, and cases from the run of day-to-day life, such as that of Heather Zabrowski, a Carnegie Medal recipient, who pulled a man from a burning vehicle on the side of the road, as well as whistleblowers and relatively unheralded others who have dedicated their lives to moral causes. I use these cases to draw a few distinctions that clarify the target phenomenon of moral heroism. First, I distinguish moral heroism from other kinds of heroism. I note different possible domains in which heroism might unfold, as well as distinguishing between heroism as a relational status (being someone’s hero) and heroism as a non-relational property (being heroic). These distinctions contribute to the wider literature on heroism, in addition to being necessary for the present project. Second, I distinguish moral heroism from other kinds of moral exemplarity, focusing on ordinary altruism and saintliness. I suggest that the difference between altruists and moral heroes is one of degree, while the difference between saints and moral heroes is more likely a difference in kind.

This chapter provides an orienting case of paradigmatic moral heroism, that of Arthur Caballero, who drowned in the process of rescuing a young girl from a river. It then introduces the central theme of the book, which is that understanding and responding to cases like this one with a virtue theory perspective leads to several problems. The book makes this argument, as well as defending an alternative approach to moral heroism that treats it as a kind of moral achievement instantiated in high-stakes sacrificing. The view developed and defended in the book fares better than virtue thinking when it comes to moral heroism in several important respects. The chapter then offers a brief chapter-by-chapter overview of how the argument unfolds.