What exactly is a hero?

[Tabby]

Like everyone else, I very much admire the courage and valor of the crew that landed a disabled jet in the Hudson River in January. But I am becoming mystified at the hero worship that continues to surround them, particularly the pilot. At the risk of sounding insensitive, weren’t they just doing their jobs? Doesn’t true heroism demand more than that?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Dictionary.com defines a hero as:

A man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities. A person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal: “He was a local hero when he saved the drowning child” (source).

By these definitions, certainly the crew of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 are heroes, even though they were also “just doing their jobs.” And, in reports I’ve heard, the crew has acknowledged that their actions that day were in accord with what they were trained to do.

But your point is also valid that there is a quality to heroism in which those being considered for the role should have demonstrated superlative virtue above and beyond what was merely expected of them. This kind of heroism is more commonly known as heroic virtue:

St. Augustine first applied the pagan title of hero to the Christian martyrs; since then the custom has prevailed of bestowing it not only on martyrs, but on all confessors whose virtues and good works greatly outdistance those of ordinary good people. Benedict XIV, whose chapters on heroic virtue are classical, thus describes heroicity: “In order to be heroic a Christian virtue must enable its owner to perform virtuous actions with uncommon promptitude, ease, and pleasure, from supernatural motives and without human reasoning, with self-abnegation and full control over his natural inclinations.” An heroic virtue, then, is a habit of good conduct that has become a second nature, a new motive power stronger than all corresponding inborn inclinations, capable of rendering easy a series of acts each of which, for the ordinary man, would be beset with very great, if not insurmountable, diffulties (source).

One of the prerequisites for this kind of heroism is choice. A person must be equally free to choose between alternatives and freely make the choice for virtue. If we were to draw an analogy from the Hudson River incident, then we could say that the crew had no choice but to try to land the plane safely and to secure the safety of everyone on board, but the crew did have choice in how to conduct themselves in doing so. By all accounts, their extraordinarily calm, measured response and their specific actions by which they put passenger safety ahead of their own could lift what they did above and beyond what might ordinarily be expected.