Courage

What Courage means in shared life

Your campaign has put on its bright blue sashes for a planning meeting. Someone proposes inviting only supporters to the next discussion: the critics would spoil the photograph. You helped choose the sashes. You also know that one critic has identified a real problem with the proposal. Before the invitations go out, you ask your allies to include the objection. Your matching colors have not supplied you with a matching judgment.

Physical Courage

Physical courage faces bodily danger for a worthy end, as a trained person may do while helping in an emergency. This is an illustration of the virtue, not an exercise or a rescue instruction.

Moral Courage

Moral courage can face social, professional or relational costs. Those costs may overlap with physical danger. Purpose, likely consequences, competence and available support all matter.

Courage does not require seeking danger or choosing confrontation. A safer route can still serve a worthy purpose; threats and possible retaliation call for attention to support and circumstances.

Courage gives…

A group can correct a proposal before loyalty turns it into a test no one is allowed to question. The objector contributes a reason the alliance needs, even when its first response is disappointment.

Finding the balance

The worthy end guides the choice of means. Speaking sooner, seeking support or choosing a quieter channel can serve the objection better than a dramatic showdown.

In ordinary life

An objection from within

Privately prepare a clear reason why a proposal you otherwise support treats someone unfairly. Distinguish the proposal from the worth of the people proposing it.

A shared statement

Before adding your name, check whether you can stand behind its treatment of people outside the group.

Nearby virtues, different work

Integrity

Integrity holds the standard steady when your side benefits; Courage faces the fear involved in acting on it.

Candor

Candor makes the objection intelligible without exaggerating what you know.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Courage: Performing independence can become another bid for applause. A courageous objection names what needs changing and why; it need not cast the speaker as the only honest person in the room.

How to cultivate Courage

• Identify the person or principle the objection serves.
• Separate the concern from the urge to win an argument.
• Consider timing, support and a channel suited to the stakes.

Try it today

Privately write two sentences about a modest shared proposal: the part you support and one principled concern you would want your own side to hear. You may rehearse them with a willing trusted person. Sending them or confronting anyone is optional; skip that step where threats, coercion or retaliation could follow.

Questions worth returning to

• What would I object to if another group proposed it?
• Which way of raising this concern would best serve the people affected?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility,—such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize disaster in case they met defeat.

   William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
   Preface

   James uses military courage as an analogy for responsible belief: judgment and preparation qualify boldness. This is not an invitation to seek danger.

2. and suffer himself to be driven by a burst of laughter, from the fortresses of demonstration.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   No. 117

   This closing clause describes Johnson’s hesitant speaker being laughed away from a demonstrable argument. Ridicule can defeat the speaker’s confidence without answering the reason.

3. And tyranny will only add to the inevitable lies and hypocrisy in our political life.

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in India

   Tagore is discussing social coercion against people who differ. Silencing critics can produce agreement on display while driving their judgments out of view.

4. That the world judges by the event, and not by the design, has been in all ages the complaint, and is the great discouragement of virtue.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   CHAP. III. Of the final cause of this irregularity of sentiments.

   Smith identifies a discouragement to worthy action: public judgment can turn on the outcome rather than the intention.

5. They who care for their fellow-men will needs be bold, but the bold may not necessarily be such as care for their fellow-men.

   Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
   Book Xiv;
   Chinese; English translation by William Jennings

   Confucius distinguishes care that calls for boldness from boldness that proves no care. The purpose of the objection matters more than its dramatic force.

6. Is the mere name of freedom so valuable that we should be willing to sacrifice for its sake our moral freedom?

   Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism
   Nationalism in India

   In a discussion of ostracism and enforced conformity, Tagore questions political freedom purchased through moral submission. The question belongs beside the pressure to agree with one’s own side.

7. Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education; section I

   Dewey explains why fear can call prudent foresight into play rather than automatically disqualifying action.

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