Notes on Courage

This post examines the virtue of courage and explores some avenues for how to improve it. This could be a starting point for expanding the LessWrong Wiki entry on Courage, and I encourage you add comments/​questions to help guide that effort.

Courage (sometimes “bravery” or the closely-related virtue of “valor”) is one of the most frequently-mentioned virtues in virtue-oriented traditions. It was one of the four “cardinal virtues” of ancient Greece, for example.

Courage is also often recommended as something that undergirds other virtues. C.S. Lewis wrote, for instance, that “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”[1] And Maya Angelou said that “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”[2]

Fear

Courage has to do with our response to fear. This response has at least three components:

  1. One concerns the way we judge how threatening a situation is — how easily spooked we are (emotional) and how sensible our risk assessment is (cognitive).

  2. Another is how we act when we are immediately confronted with a frightening scenario — how well we think and perform while afraid.

  3. The third is how we respond to the possibility of being in a fearful scenario at some future time (sometimes “fear” in this anticipatory context is called “anxiety,” “worry,” or “dread”) — whether our risk-aversion is well-honed or whether we are overly risk averse because we “fear fear itself.”

Fear is an unpleasant good in the same sort of way that pain and nausea are: Such things are no fun, but they are useful. Fear (when it is operating properly) informs you that you have managed to put yourself in a situation in which you run the risk of harm, and the unpleasantness of the sensation of fear prompts you to be averse to doing it again. Fear also can prepare you for an immediate, protective fight-or-flight response.

(Although we are averse to fear, we sometimes also perversely seek it out. In a similar way perhaps to how some people crave the pain of ghost chilies or spankings; some people crave the fright of horror movies and roller-coasters. Is this perhaps a way of helping to regulate our fear response through practice or inoculation?)

The visceral fear response is adaptive and it’s no surprise that we see it in other animals and that it seems to be to some extent a “deep,” subconscious part of our mental make-up. This can also make our fears difficult to work with on a conscious, rational level, as the experiences of people with phobias, panic disorders, anxiety disorders, or post-traumatic stress show.

Is there One Courage or Many?

In a lot of my reading from virtue-based traditions, courage is exemplified by the bravery of the warrior in battle. Aristotle, for example, started there and then generalized this to courage in the face of other deliberate human-caused threats, but he was reluctant to go further and say that the courage of someone who behaves bravely when threatened with disease or impoverishment was quite in the same ballpark.[3] Nowadays we’re more likely to recognize a variety of fears as being things we need courage to confront: fear of rejection, fear of mortality, fear of humiliation, fear of standing out, and so forth. We may speak of the “intellectual courage” it takes to resist the temptation to sweep an inconvenient truth under the rug, or the “moral courage” it takes to stand up for what you know is right in the face of social disapproval.[4]

But it may be that when you stretch the word courage to cover so much territory, you are no longer describing a single virtue. When I was putting together this post I saw this tweet from Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC comics fame) who has been researching the history of space exploration: “For the space book, I am reading about people in extreme environments. Interesting thing: bravery is not cross contextual. You can be a brave mountaineer and still not brave at social situations.”

Counterfeit Courage

In addition to the more common failure of cowardice, our response to fear can also fail in the opposite direction. There are brain disorders that can disable the ability to feel fear viscerally,[5] thus throwing you back on mere conscious evaluation. Alcohol use is notorious for inducing temporary YOLO-recklessness and failure to recognize and respond appropriately to danger. Aristotle for this reason put the courageous “golden mean” at a mid-point between the vice of over-sensitivity to fear (cowardice) and the vice of under-sensitivity (rashness).[3]

People without real courage will often try to counterfeit courage in social situations (“braggadocio”), as Shakespeare so vividly put it:

How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
as stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
the beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
who inward searched, have livers white as milk;
and these assume but valour’s excrement
to render them redoubted.[6]

Another form of counterfeit courage is exhibited by someone who is forced to to choose between fearful things — a soldier who seems brave in battle only because he fears being shot for desertion or being disgraced in his community, for instance. Sometimes people suggest “hacks” for changing behaviors that seem to rely on this sort of thing (e.g. set up an artificial scenario in which if you fail to do frightening thing X, $100 will be donated in your name to something you would be horrified to be associated with).

There is also a way of resolving fear that mostly side-steps the issue of cowardice or courage: that is, to make the fearful situation less fearful. One way to do this is to increase your competence. So for example if you have a fear of public speaking, you might participate in Toastmasters, which is designed to create a non-threatening environment in which to practice a variety of public speaking skills. As your abilities improve, so does your confidence, and what was fear-inducing no longer is. This in a way is another form of counterfeit courage (Aristotle said, for example, that in a storm, sailors were not exhibiting more courage than their frightened passengers, but merely a better handle on the situation).[3] On the other hand, it is a way of meeting a frightening situation head-on and proving your mastery over it, which strikes me as something that could be a helpful way of bolstering courage.

Becoming Courageous

Zach Weinersmith, in that tweet above, cited the book Extreme: Why some people thrive at the limits by Emma Barrett and Paul Martin. Barrett & Martin conclude that “We all have a greater capacity to be brave than we sometimes appreciate” and identify three elements of the fear response — “physiological, cognitive, and behavioral” — each of which comes with handles we can learn to manipulate in order to take more conscious control over how we respond to fear and thereby develop more courage:

  1. If you are aware and observant of your physiological response to fear, you can (once the initial shock passes, perhaps) take conscious steps to regulate it rather than just reacting to it or letting it take the reins. This implicates the additional virtues of mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

  2. If you assess risk more rationally, you will save your anxiety for situations that deserve it.

  3. And with deliberation and practice, you can adjust how you respond while in fearful or anxiety-provoking scenarios.

Another suggestion, and again this comes from Aristotle, is to try to look on courage as a valuable end in itself and not just as something instrumental. In other words, rather than just saying “I wish I were more courageous, for then I could do scary things like X, Y, & Z, which I value” say also “and furthermore I would exhibit courage, which I also value.” This may improve the motivation you have for being courageous, and increase the pleasure you feel from your courageous acts (and therefore the reward you receive).

In Christopher Peterson’s and Martin E.P. Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues, they review the literature on courage and conclude:

Bravery can be promoted by practice (moral habit), by example (modeling), and by developing certain attributes of the individual (self-confidence) or group (cohesion).[7]

They also summarized the not particularly well-tested, but intuitively appealing pop-psychology approaches to improving courage (e.g. Awaken the Giant Within) in this way:

This set of ideas… [builds] on a physiological, habitual, and attitudinal approach to cultivating bravery. Physiologically, people are encouraged to find a sense of courageousness within their body, and to use classical conditioning to associate some movement with the bodily sensation of power. Habitually, people are encouraged to become aware of their language and thought patterns and to break the ones that are especially limiting. Attitudinally, people are encouraged to engage in imagination and visualization exercises that help support a valorous disposition and help them with emotion regulation.[7]

Other virtues may come to the assistance of courage. For instance if you have more optimism, you may be more brave because the positive potential consequences of your bravery are more salient than they would be otherwise. If you have better endurance, that may help you put up with fear, or may give you more confidence that you can get through the worst of whatever fearful thing you are up against. If you have more loyalty, honor, or duty, such things may add to the value of your courageousness or the costs of your cowardice, and so may lead indirectly to bravery. Better self-control may help you regulate your response to fear so that it does not immediately carry you away.

Additional Resources

If you’re fond of audio/​visual learning, there are a couple of nice short videos out there: How to stop feeling scared all the time from School of Life, which concerns how to short-circuit excess anxiety, and How to stop being a coward from Academy of Ideas, which is a bit more on the philosophical side.

The Getselfhelp.co.uk site has some worksheets and suggestions you can use if anxiety is causing you to avoid situations that would be beneficial to you. Skills You Need has a page on courage.

  1. ^

    C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), letter ⅩⅩⅨ

  2. ^

    Maya Angelou, Meeting Dr. Du Bois (audio interview by Krista Tippett, 2014)

  3. ^
  4. ^

    See, for example, Rushworth M. Kidder, Moral Courage (2006)

  5. ^

    See, for example, Marissa Fessenden, “This Woman Can’t Feel Fear” Smithsonian, 21 January 2015

  6. ^

    William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Bassanio speaking, Act 3, Scene 2)

  7. ^

    Christopher Peterson & Martin E.P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues (2004), pp. 221, 226