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Professor Urmson on ‘saints and Heroes’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Yogendra Chopra
Yogendra Chopra
Affiliation:
Monash University, Melbourne
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Extract

In a paper entitled ‘Saints and Heroes’1 Professor J. O. Urmson has criticised ‘the trichotomy of duties, indifferent actions, and wrongdoing’ (p. 215), commonly found in moral philosophy, on the ground that it fails to cover an important class of actions, of which saintly and heroic actions are ‘conspicuous” but by no means the only examples. I am inclined to think that this trichotomy is defensible, and that at least it deserves a much longer run for its money than Urmson gives it. The form in which he presents it, however, makes it more implausible than it need be and this is perhaps the main reason why he finds it so indefensible.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 38 , Issue 144 , April 1963 , pp. 160 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1963

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References

page 160 note 1 Contributed to a volume of ‘Essays in Ethical Theory”, edited by Melden, A. I., 1958 (pp. 198–216).Google Scholar

page 160 note 2 ‘It is possible’, he says a sentence later in the same paragraph, ‘to go just beyond one's duty by being a little more generous, forbearing, helpful, or forgiving than fair dealing demands, or to go a very long way beyond the basic code of duties with the saint or the hero.’Google Scholar

page 162 note 1 MrPeter, Herbst, in his paper on ‘Freedom and Prediction’ (Mind, Jan. 1957), has brilliantly exposed some of the pitfalls of the notion of will-power.Google Scholar