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.

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.

In this chapter, I explore and defend the idea that the core experience of worship involves a fitting response to the excellence of the divine, and that this can be understood in roughly the same ways that we understand fitting responses to excellence in general. I also defend a particular account of the excellence involved here – I argue that in worship, as in many other cases of fitting response to excellence, we are tracking intrinsic value. Along the way, I respond to Mark Murphy’s arguments for the conclusion that no creature could have intrinsic value.

Envy can either motivate to push oneself up to the level of the envied, or to pull the envied down to one’s own level. This leveling orientation has been explained in two ways. The first explanation focuses on the role of perceived control over the outcome: when the envier thinks they can level up, they will feel benign envy; when they think they cannot can level up, they will feel malicious envy. The second explanation is grounded in the notion of focus of concern: when the envier is concerned about the envied good, they are motivated to get it, and thus to level up; when they are concerned about their inferiority with the envied rival, they are motivated to take them down, and thus to level down. This chapter shows that these models of explanation need not be incompatible. The variables at play are independent and their intersection is responsible for the existence of four kinds of envy. It illustrates a paradigmatic case for each, providing a detailed analysis of the phenomenology, situational determinants, motivational structure, and typical behavioral outputs, and explains how they differ from nearby emotions and attitudes such as admiration, covetousness, and spite.