Abstract

When Urmson first challenged moral philosophers to account for the phenomenon of supererogation, contemporary virtue ethics was just in its infancy. So, virtue ethicists were understandably delayed in taking up that challenge, and thus the relationship between the two remained opaque. What little discussion of virtue and supererogation there was focused on the ancients rather than their contemporary intellectual heirs and tended to be skeptical about the compatibility of supererogation and virtue ethics. Lately, this has begun to change. A number of philosophers have developed and defended sophisticated virtue-ethical accounts of supererogation. But doubts linger. Recently, important proponents of virtue ethics have argued that the intuitions underlying Urmson’s challenge can and should be accommodated without embracing supererogation, or by giving a highly revisionary account of it. In this essay, I confront these lingering doubts. In doing so, I hope to suggest that there is a good reason why virtue-ethical accounts of supererogation have lately proliferated. There are still some intuitions about moral heroism, and moral goodness more generally, that resist capture in a virtue ethics that deflates or eliminates the category of supererogation altogether.