James Opie Urmson MC (4 March 1915 – 29 January 2012)[1] was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Urmson was educated at Kingswood School, Bath (1928–1934), and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1934–38).

In 1955 he accepted an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at Queen's College Dundee, then part of the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

David Heyd records that "the history of supererogation in non-religious ethical theory" began with Urmson's 'seminal' "Saints and Heroes" (1958).

[5][6] This paper, according to Heyd, "opened the contemporary discussion of supererogation," while hardly mentioning the term, "by challenging the traditional threefold classification of moral action: the obligatory, the permitted (or indifferent) and the prohibited.