Saints, heroes, sages, and villains
Name
Saints Heroes Phil Studies Final Version.pdf
Size
264.64 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
cf83a7729259940c162dfe90df4f8f05
Author(s)
Markovits, Julia
Date Issued
March 2012
Journal
Philosophical Studies
Publisher
Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
Citation
Markovits, Julia. “Saints, Heroes, Sages, and Villains.” Philosophical Studies 158.2 (2012): 289–311. Web.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is
a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is
morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I
think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it
fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral
goodness is more multi-faceted. My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness:
the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our
common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of
moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in
our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what
makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if
anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to
explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9883-x
