The Anatomy of Courage

David Pears The Anatomy of Courage WERE THE SEPTEMBER 11 HIJACKERS COURAGEOUS? SUSAN SONTAG wrote in the New Yorker a week after the attacks that “if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of cour­ age (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of last Tuesday’s slaughter they were not cowards.” George Ochoa, in a letter to the New Yorker two weeks later, took a different view and cited Aristotle’s analysis of courage in support of it: “Aristotle made the case that a courageous person is one who faces fearful things as he ought and as reason dictates ‘for the sake of what is noble.’ If Susan Sontag thinks that the terrorists acted for the sake of what is noble and followed a reasonable course of action to achieve that end, she should say so and say why. But if not, she would do better to call the terrorists not courageous but rash—‘pretenders in courage’ in Aristotle’s view.” This disagreement turns on one of the most disputed questions about courage: Does its value depend, to any extent, on the value of the agent’s goal? Susan Sontag called it “a morally neutral virtue” and evidently she did not mean that a courageous act has no intrinsic moral value—that is, no moral value that is independent of the moral value of its goal. That would be an implausible view because it would make it impossible to understand why we count courage as any kind ofvirtue. It would, in fact, be the way in which we would value the skill with which social research Voi 71 : No 1 : Spring 2004 1 an act is done. For example, we might condemn a murder on moral grounds but put a high value on the murderer’s marksmanship—an assessment that would not be moral and so would not be affected by our moral condemnation o f his goal. But that is obviously not what Susan Sontag meant. For she called courage a “virtue” and that clearly implies that, unlike a skill, it does have intrinsic moral value. So what she must have meant was that the moral value of the goal of the coura­ geous act does not increase or diminish the intrinsic moral value of the courage with which it was achieved. The two items are entered on the moral balance sheet in separate columns. We need a heading for the column in which the intrinsic moral value of courage will be entered and the heading “executive virtues” would be appropriate (that is, virtues exhibited purely and exclusively in the way in which the goal is achieved). The value ofloyalty, single-minded devotion to a cause, fortitude, and even meticulousness would be entered in this column. The value of a skill, like marksmanship, would be entered in a different column. For though its value is distinct from the value ofthe projects that it helps an agent to achieve, it is not a moral value, because it has no direct connection with the agent’s character. So far this has been shallow water. But George Ochoa’s implied rejection of the distinction between executive virtues and virtues tout court takes us into the deep end. He cites Aristotle’s thesis that a coura­ geous person is one who faces fearful things as he ought and as reason directs “for the sake of what is noble,” endorses it, and concludes that, therefore, the September 11 hijackers could be judged courageous only by someone who believed that their goal was noble. If his argument were convincing, it would destroy the case for giving executive virtues the special treatment that would allow them to claim intrinsic moral value even when the goal is morally bad. IS HIS ARGUMENT CONVINCING? THE FIRST STEP TOWARD ANSWERING this question must be to analyze Aristotle’s account of courage, which has several features not to be found in any modem account. Here great care 2 social research...