Achilles and Socrates: ancient attempts to integrate virtue, death, and human perfection -- Practical reason, perfection, and finitude in Aquinas -- Death and human perfection in Aquinas -- The role of courage in Aquinas's account of human perfection -- Aquinas on courage, martyrdom, and the common good -- Contemporary exemplarist virtue theory and moral motivation in the face of death -- The prospect and limitations of Thomistic moral exemplarism.

This paper draws upon the meta-ethical insights of Bernard Lonergan and Raimond Gaita to bolster the foundational claims of Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory. I aim to refine Zagzebski’s approach by pointing out how a community’s inevitable prioritization of a given paradigm of moral exemplarity plays a decisive role in the trajectory of its ethical reasoning. I conclude by arguing that within the Christian community, encounters with sanctity should determine the identification of virtues rather than vice versa.