What Moral Saints Look Like

Most of us have never met a moral saint, and so it may be diffi cult for us to imagine what such a person would be like. Even before thinking too deeply about what it takes to be a moral saint, we tend to think that being a saint must be quite diffi cult. We might even think that the dif-fi culty of being a moral saint — the sacrifi ce it involves — is in fact a burden, a project so all-consuming that it causes a person to be deprived in certain important ways. If this deprivation is severe enough, the life of the moral saint begins to look awfully bleak. Indeed, the most infl u-ential philosophical account of moral sainthood paints a rather bleak picture. But is it really so bad to be a moral saint? If we look more care-fully at just what is required for moral sainthood, and if we observe the life of a living, breathing moral saint, we fi nd that it is not so bad after all. In her famous paper ‘Moral Saints, ’ Susan Wolf argues that it is not rational to want to be a moral saint. A moral saint is someone who is ‘a