The Choiceworthlessness of Transformative Heroism

History abounds with transformative moral heroes—agents devoting their lives to uprooting entrenched unjust structures. Though philosophy has said much about heroes generally, this distinctive class remains undertheorized. This matters because they are among our most celebrated moral exemplars, and much of our sense of moral progress rests on them. Yet they characteristically act against familiar constraints on responsible deliberation, pursuing apparently infeasible and inefficacious projects while foreclosing tractable alternatives that would secure demonstrable goods. We establish this tension and argue that the most promising attempts to dissolve it fail. At best, this shows that moral theory is structurally conservative, as its standards of responsible deliberation systematically favor mitigation over transformation. At worst, it reveals a deeper instability in moral theory, as it seems to depend for its progress on agents it cannot vindicate.