In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

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 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 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.

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 compares the impact of different regulatory tools (command and control, mandates, and incentives relative to reasoning, honesty oath, and nudge) on the crowding out of different types of intrinsic compliance motivations.

In Tusculans 2 the interlocutors discuss the value of physical pain. They swiftly agree that it is not the greatest evil but take longer to consider whether it is bad or, as the Stoics think, merely indifferent. Enduring pain is taken to be an indication of courage and manliness (virtus) and this is undermined by the claim that physical pain is not bad. Therefore neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics provide a wholly satisfactory account of the value of physical pain and its relationship to virtue.

This chapter focuses on Cicero’s treatment of the emotions in Books 3 and 4, and more specifically on his account of the dispute between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. At first sight, the dispute seems uncomplicated: the Stoics advocate the complete absence of emotions whereas the Peripatetics hold that emotions should rather be moderated or controlled. But Cicero’s stress on the idea that emotions are beliefs seems to come at the expense of other central parts of the theory of emotions, most prominently the theory of action.  I argue that these features of his presentation serve him in securing a thesis that he is keen to defend in Book 5: that virtue guarantees happiness and that this happiness is invulnerable to the accidents of fortune.

‘The Personified Will’ examines how the faculty of the will was depicted as a personified character in English Renaissance plays. The will was portrayed in a variety of benevolent and malevolent guises, yet the function of these characters has not yet been integrated into our appreciation of the era’s dramatic conventions. I argue that we may more fully appreciate the ways that dramatists queried the practical expression of individual liberty, identity, and civil harmony by attending to a historically disregarded set of Will characters (from Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). The performance of the personified will offers important, but hitherto overlooked, evidence of how playwrights attempted to scrutinize the nature of human freedom and social concord, and the extent to which personifications of the will were used to legitimize contemporary systems of status and authority. Exploring the actions of honourable and corrupt personifications of the will provides a way to elucidate the ethical predicaments associated with will’s performance, which the second chapter of this book examines in more detail.

The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

Because the full reconstruction emerges piecemeal over the course of the study, this chapter starts by summarizing the most fundamental ways in which Aquinas connects the big-picture elements of his ethics through his understanding of happiness, both individual and common. The chapter then offers reasons for thinking that Aquinas’s ethics of happiness is still worth taking seriously today. In particular, it focuses on three illustrative aspects that make Aquinas’s ethical views distinctive and appealing. The first is Aquinas’s account of the nature of happiness and how that account fits into his broader understanding of well-being. The second is Aquinas’s account of the relationship between the right and the good. The third is Aquinas’s account of the most comprehensive role that virtue plays in ethics and human life.

This chapter explains the many ways in which individual happiness and common happiness are related to Aquinas’s account of virtue. It begins by arguing that virtue is strictly necessary in order for an individual to be happy, but still virtue is not a constitutive part of that happiness. Rather, it is strictly necessary because virtue alone enables the individual to engage in and enjoy genuinely good activities. The chapter then argues that, still, according to Aquinas, virtue is more deeply related to common happiness than individual happiness inasmuch as a character trait is a virtue of character fundamentally because it enables a person to play their part in realizing the common happiness of their community, not their own individual happiness. The chapter thereby establishes the third element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism. The remainder of the chapter shows how the master virtues of general justice and charity as well as a whole host of other particular virtues concern aiming at and securing common happiness for the community.

How are virtues constituted psychologically? The virtues of caring or substantive virtues are dispositional concerns for the good in its various aspects: the well-being of people and other animals, the avoidance or relief of their suffering, the reconciliation of enemies, knowledge and truth, justice, proper formation of sensual desire and pleasure, and one’s duties. Generosity, compassion, forgivingness, justice, and the sense of duty are examples of virtues constituted by such caring. Because the caring is virtuous only if directed to real goods, the concerns need to be shaped by correct thought (understanding). The virtues of caring divide into direct (for example, generosity) and indirect (for example, justice). Another class of virtues – the enkratic – are powers, abilities, or skills of self-management. These, too, require understanding – of self and how to manage it in the various situations and influences of life. Examples are self-control, courage, patience, and perseverance.

This chapter asks where Kant stands on one of the most famous contentions of ancient ethics: the so-called Unity of the Virtues, the claim that a person who has one of the virtues must have all of them. The twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics was partly prompted by explorations of this proposal – its centrality to ancient theories and its presumed implausibility for philosophers today. Kant announces that he rejects three ancient premises about virtue, the first of which is “there is only one virtue and one vice”. The chapter argues that he thereby rejects the Unity of the Virtues, as the Stoics conceive of it. For Kant, virtue-singular is prior to virtues-plural, but it is not one. The virtues-plural are not parts of virtue; the latter is not a whole in the way the Stoics take it to be. Nevertheless, Kant shares more with the ancients than with twentieth-century philosophers writing on the topic. He endorses the premise that virtue-singular is prior to the virtues-plural.