Courage as a Virtue

George Kateb Courage as a Virtue COURAGE IS AN IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECT. NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS, people (including myself) will always respect, even admire, cour­ age regardless of the purpose or the cause in which it is displayed. One of the worst reproaches in the world is to be called a coward, accused of lacking in courage—again, alm ost no m atter what the purpose or cause. It is merely clumsy propaganda (though clever in intention) to label as cowards the suicide hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It is, I suppose, the shocking element of surprise in the attack that unconsciously helps to spare such propaganda the derision it deserves. Cowardly was the one terrible thing the suicide hijackers were not. If their religion cast an invincible spell on them, it nonetheless remains true that they needed courage to carry out their plot—a sort of courage that is closer to that shown by martyrs than by battlefield soldiers. And if we want to condemn their courage we have to say more than that they acted on behalf of a cause we abhor. In any case, bad causes do not usually stand in the way o f admitting, despite Bush’s propaganda, that courage is often shown in them. To come to term s with our impulse really means that we should try to hold fast to the thought that the virtue of courage cannot be shown in a bad cause. We have to suggest furtherm ore that virtuous action should alone receive unperplexed and self-consistent admiration. Only in virtuous action can the virtue of courage be shown. In a bad cause, another kind of courage is shown, which we should learn to censure; it is an unvirtuous courage because it does not intend a moral effect and it works with the force and effect of a vice. social research Voi 71 : No 1 : Spring 2004 39 In “Civil Disobedience” (2001 [1848]), Thoreau says, “The broad­ est and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue.” He maintains that those who despite their disapproval of state policy nonetheless fall in behind it are “undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters” (210). The issue for Thoreau is the institution of slavery and how people who know better sustain it with their patriotic alle­ giance. He is thus grappling with the peculiar way in which virtues (or ostensible virtues) can do the work of vices by lending their excel­ lence to a system of wrongdoing. We should notice the inversion of Thoreau’s view: Machiavelli’s claim that when rulers practice ordi­ nary virtues in political life (virtues like generosity, compassion, and trustworthiness), their virtues do more harm than the corresponding vices. But only a theorist who is enthralled by the project of imperial­ ist greatness rather than devoted to limited politics would devise such an argument. He knows that ordinary virtues impede active greatness. (Luther gives a differently motivated but even more ruthless inversion than Machiavelli: acts of punishment and war are actually acts of altru­ istic love toward criminals and enemies.) My assertion that the virtue of courage works preponderantly with the effects of a vice does unde­ niably bear a formal resemblance to Machiavelli’s claim, but I argue from within a moral framework, and Machiavelli does not. That makes a difference. There must be continuity between private and political morality if politics is not to be as virulent as many of its practitioners want it to be. No, the real ancestor of Thoreau’s observation is the contention ofThrasymachus in Plato’s Republic that if to be just is to be law-abiding, then one takes part in systematic injustice when one obeys the laws, which are always unjust. The virtue ofjustice does the work and has the effect of the vice of injustice. Underlying such law-abidingness is the will to believe what one is told and the disposition to do what people expect. Whatever the merits of Thrasymachus’s claim in any particu­ lar society, the capacity of courage, specifically, to lend itself to wrong­ doing is a ubiquitous fact. More than any other human trait, courage seems to be...