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 completes the picture of moral heroism the book offers. I address the tension in the account that arises from the combination of my practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the feature of sacrifices that they are chosen over an available alternative. I do so by distinguishing between ways in which an agent’s choice becomes constrained. Another tension is between the practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the deontic status of being supererogatory. I show how an action can be practically necessary and supererogatory.

These arguments lead to a more general consideration of the supererogatory status of moral heroism, which unfolds in three phases: first in terms of the reasons and duties we might have to aspire to moral heroism, second in terms of programs designed to socially engineer moral heroism, and finally in terms of parents or caretakers raising children to become moral heroes. In all three phases, I argue that the goals of becoming morally heroic or helping others to do so are not simply universally laudable and fitting. This is an important quality of my view that is again an improvement over virtue thinking, which positions moral heroes more straightforwardly as models for emulation.