| Summary: | 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.
|
|---|