Excerpted from Moral Courage by Rushworth M. Kidder, pages 68 – 70.
In recent years we’ve discerned a quiet trend in our seminars at the Institute for Global Ethisc. As some of the lists [of values] indicate, there’s a growing desire to add a sixth value to the mix: courage. Participants who select it often observe that without courage the other values are inoperative. Even the most sophisticated awareness of values, the most sustained capacity for moral reasoning, needs to be made active–a point Confucius made in noting that “to see what is right and not to do it is a want of courage.”
But courage alone may or may not constitute a moral force. In the philospher’s distinction between terminal and instrumental values–between fundamental, intrinsic virtues of humanity and the strategic, operational values that lubricate human behavior–concepts like diligence, patience, and perseverance fall into the latter category. So does courage. The question “Why is courage important?” should stimulate a response like “In order to attain fairness, responsibility, truth, or the other intrinsic values.” But ask “Why is truth important?” and you may simply get a slaw-jawed stare of incomprehension. Truth isn’t useful to get anywhere. It’s the where toward which humanity ought to be headed, the ultimate terminus of our journey. Courage is different. It’s important not for its own sake but because it leads to higher things. It has, as Susan Sontag writes, “no moral value in itself, for courage is not, in itself, a moral virtue. Vicious scoundrels, murderers, terrorists, may be brave. To describe courage as a virtue, we need an adjective: We speak of ‘moral courage’–because there is such a thing as moral courage, too.”
The term moral is commonly used in two distinct ways. It defines those areas of concern that consider questions of right and wrong–as opposed to, say, political (which considers questions of power) or economic (which considers questions of wealth). But we also use the term to mean good, right, or just. In the phrase “moral dilemma,” for example, it refers to the first sense: we understand it to mean “a dilemma about right and wrong,” not “a good dilemma.” But when we say, “that was a highly moral act,” we use it as a term of praise for something right and proper, rather than simply as a description of an act operating in the realm of good or bad choices.
That ambiguity carries over into the meaning of moral courage. To be sure, the phrase refers, in a somewhat neutral way, to the courage that operates within the realm of concern for good and bad, right and wrong. But if by moral we mean that which is good, then moral courage also means the positive courage to be ethical. That, it would seem, is the way the public intuitively wants to use it. And if by ethical we mean taking action that accords with the core values of honesty, fairness, respect, responsibility, and compassion, then moral courage means the courage to invoke and practice those values. Pass te white light of moral courage through the prism of our understanding of values, in other words, and it breaks out into a five-banded spectrum: the courge to be honest, to be fair, to be respectful, to be responsibile, and to be compassionate. And if the word values is in some way synonymous with convictions, then moral courage is, as it’s often characterized, “the courage of your convictions” in these five key areas.
That line of reasoning suggests why the trend we’ve noted–the desire to add courage as a sixth element to the definition of moral–doesn’t quite work. Courage isn’t like the other values, but what is it?
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Themocracy