>>Courage is the quality that allows us to face fear and overcome obstacles for the sake
of a cherished value. The courageous person takes risks, sometimes risking life and sometimes
losing it. Courage was the supreme virtue in warrior cultures and we think of the hero
as the exemplar of courage. Stories of heroes abound in the literature of many cultures
from Homer’s Iliad to Jonathan Lear’s recent book Radical Hope, which is about the
last great chief of the Crow nation. One story that shows the many dimensions of the hero
is Beowulf, the great Anglo-Saxon poem of the 8th century. The poet describes Beowulf
as a man of valor who was formidable in battle yet behaved with honor, and took no advantage.
Never cut down a comrade who was drunk, kept his temper, and warrior that he was, watched
and controlled his god-sent strength and his outstanding natural powers. As he dies after
being slain by the dragon Beowulf sees himself as held up to judgment and it is important
to him that he is blameless before the ruler of mankind. He is a man of honor. Courage
allows him to act fearlessly but he is fearless in the pursuit of honorable goals. Courage
always supports some other value. In the modern world, the role of a courageous warrior does
not determine one’s identity as it did for Beowulf. But there are still modern heroes.
Earlier I mentioned rescuers of Jews in the holocaust. Civil rights workers were another
group of courageous heroes. Rosa Parks is an example of someone who stood for what she
thought was right, against what she thought was wrong, even though all the power was on
the other side and imprisonment was an actual risk, even when lynching was possible. The
US congress has called her the mother of the freedom movement. We all need courage even
in ordinary life. I think it takes courage to speak up in class to say something unpopular.
For some students, speaking at all takes courage. When I was a student I was always afraid to
speak in class. And I can’t say that I did a very good job of overcoming the fear. I
think this means that an act that is easy for some people can take a lot of courage
for someone else. Does a courageous act have to be successful in its end? What if someone
rushes into a burning building to save a child but the child perishes? What if Leopold Socha
had not succeeded in saving a single Jew from the Nazis? What if Rosa Parks in the civil
rights movement had not ultimately succeeded? In a study by Pury and Hensel participants
were asked to describe a courageous act they did themselves. Almost all of them were acts
that succeeded. The researchers got the same results when they asked the participants to
name courageous acts done by others. And when the participants were asked to rank the degree
of courage of different acts they ranked successful acts as more courageous than the unsuccessful
ones. This is an interesting result because it takes the same ability to overcome fear
in an unsuccessful act as in a successful one. We would think that that ability is courage.
What is the person who faces danger fearlessly acts for an evil end? I asked in a previous
lecture whether the 9/11 terrorists were courageous. In a different study Cynthia Pury and Charles
Starkey studied peoples’ answers to that question. They found conflicting reactions.
Some participants said that calling the terrorists courageous means endorsing the attack in its
ends. Where as others thought that it is the terrorists’ perception that is relevant
to whether they acted courageously. Pury and Starkey proposed the term courage is used
in two different ways. Sometimes it implies endorsement of the courageous person’s ends
and they call that accolade courage. Sometimes it does not have an implication and they call
that processed courage. I don’t know whether it is necessary to invent two words to explain
the conflicting reactions to the terrorists. We can talk about that in class. Aristotle
thought that every virtue is a mean between extremes where one extreme is an excess and
the other is a deficiency and some emotion or patter of behavior. Courage is a good example
of this idea because courage seems to be in between cowardice and full heartiness. The
cowardly person has too much fear and the full hearty person has too little. So I agree
with Aristotle that there are two vices opposed to courage. But I think there’s an interesting
difference in the way we respond to the vice of cowardice and the vice of full heartiness
or rashness. We feel contempt for the cowardly person but I don’t think we feel contempt
for the full hearty person. I agree that we disapprove of full heartiness but we might
still feel fascination even maybe an odd kind of admiration for such a person because he
or she has overcome ordinary human fear. You might think a feat of recklessness like James
Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, playing the game of racing a car as far as possible to
the edge of a cliff. Courage is a virtue but only when the risk is made for something really
valuable. So the James Dean Character is not courageous but he clearly has the ability
to become courageous so maybe that is why there is a kind of admiration for him. How
can people become courageous? I don’t know of a program dedicated to the development
of courage in particular but the closest I’m familiar with is the heroic imagination project
in San Francisco started by retired Stanford Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo. They
have developed a number of programs designed to be useful and developing the skills needed
to resist bullying, negative conformity and mindless obedience. They apply research on
social psychology in these areas to help people act wisely during challenging social situations.
My own view is that exemplars of courage have an important role in leading people to emulate
what is admirable and exceptionally courageous persons. There’s beginning to be empirical
research on exemplars and the use of exemplars in moral education. I am a consultant on several
of these research projects and initiatives and I will give you an opportunity to investigate
the relationship between exemplars and moral learning in this course.