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 “Reductionism,” Rorty takes up the question “Can we abandon reductive analysis as a method of philosophical discovery and still keep the intellectual gains which have accrued from its employment as a method of deciding what questions to discuss?” Rorty uses the notion of reductionism to both present a synoptic vision of the history of Western philosophy and put forward an original metaphilosophical position. After presenting the twentieth-century program of reductive linguistic analysis as a mature form of the seventeetn century’s “reductionist conception” of the goal of inquiry, he examines J. O. Urmson’s arguments, ultimately finding that Urmson falls short of applying reductive analysis to the technical vocabularies of philosophers. Even though Rorty agrees with Urmson that most reductive analyses, judged by their own standards, are unsuccessful, Rorty nevertheless thinks a basis for distinguishing useful from useless analyses is possible. We also see here Rorty’s early interest in eliminability, which shortly thereafter becomes the basis for a distinctive contribution.