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. The way we judge how threatening a situation is — how easily spooked we are (emotional) and how sensible our risk assessment is (cognitive).
2. How we act when we are immediately confronted with a frightening scenario — how well we think and perform while afraid.
3. 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.

Some people who have considered the subject believe that there is a further qualification on courageous acts: they must be goal-directed acts (you are courageous in order to accomplish something, not just to show off your courage, or in quixotic but hopeless defiance of a fearful thing, or by merely remaining unruffled) and that goal must be a good one.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5]

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: 

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,^[6] 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).^[4]

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.^[7]

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).^[4] 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, anyway) 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).^[8]

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.^[8]

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.

Researchers asked a set of subjects to describe a time when they acted courageously, and also asked them whether, when they had done so, they had taken some action to try to augment their courage. 82% said they had, and gave descriptions of the tactics they had used:

12% of participants described increasing their courage by problem-focused coping, including gearing up for action, reminding themselves of their training, and mentally rehearsing what they planned to do. Emotion-focused coping was used by 30% of participants, who described increasing their courage by strategies such as keeping a positive focus, reminding themselves of the reasons not to be afraid, and getting encouragement from other people. A third broad category, which we called outcome-focused strategies, was used by 48% of participants. This approach included thinking of the person being helped, reminding one’s self of the rightness of the action, and thinking about one’s obligation to act, among others. Doing nothing was reported by 18%, 5% reported acting on instinct (a close relative of doing nothing), and 1% reported praying. Finally, 13% reported using multiple strategies, typically an emotion-focused strategy combined with something else, thus the numbers reported add up to more than 100%^[9]

The researchers found that different strategies were more typically deployed for different classes of scenarios demanding courage. To evoke physical courage, people were more likely to rely on problem-focused strategies. To evoke psychological courage, emotion-focused strategies. To evoke moral courage, outcome-focused strategies. They suggest that you can use problem-focused strategies to reduce risk, emotion-focused strategies to dampen fear, and outcome-focused strategies to highlight the worthiness of the goal.

Particularly in cases of irrational or exaggerated fear, exposure therapy can be helpful. The fearful person is exposed to the frightful thing—at first in a small, distant, contained way, but later in increasingly unrestrained doses—to learn through direct experience that the thing is harmless or that its harms are tolerable after all.

If circumstances permit and you know how to go about it, you can counteract the physiological symptoms of fear through deliberate exercises of imagining calm scenes, deep breathing, or muscle relaxation.^[10]

Righteous anger—particularly when it is emotionally raw—can both help motivate you to overcome your fear, and (albeit irrationally) promote optimism about the results of the actions you plan to take on its behalf, which can make such a response seem less frightening.^[11]

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. ^{^}

   e.g. Douglas N. Walton “The Virtue of Courage” The Recovery of Virtue (1987) p. 602

   The insistence that the goal of the courageous action be a good one is controversial. I tend to think that the courageousness or cowardice of an act or a person is in general orthogonal to the moral worth of the action (though courage might be shown by, for example, standing up for something morally right but unpopular).

   But in popular and much academic use, people resist the idea that, for example, a Nazi soldier’s derring-do qualifies as courage. Bill Maher, on his Politically Incorrect talk show shortly after the 9/11 attacks, pushed back against George W. Bush’s description of the attackers as having been cowardly, saying:

   We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, [it’s] not cowardly.

   Maher had to walk that comment back in the face of outrage that led to advertiser boycotts, stations refusing to carry his show, and declining viewership.

   If someone endures something frightful for self-interested reasons (e.g. to gain something for themselves), this is less likely to appear as courage because it can be attributed instead to selfish desire outweighing fear. If on the other hand you do something like that but without any hope of personal gain, this has a better chance of being interpreted as courageous. And it is easier to imagine going out on such a limb in the service of values you consider good than those you consider bad or indifferent. Perhaps this partially explains the intuition that people who do self-sacrificing, frightening things that seem to us to also be bad things must be exhibiting something other than courageousness.

4. ^{^}

   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅲ.6

5. ^{^}

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

   Another variety, dubbed “vital courage” by Deborah Finfgeld, concerns people who display courage in the face of serious illness or personal hardship. [D. Finfgeld “Becoming and being courageous in the chronically ill elderly” Issues in Mental Health Nursing (1995); D. Finfgeld “Courage as a process of pushing beyond the struggle” Qualitative Health Research (1999)] This perhaps shades into perseverance.

6. ^{^}

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

7. ^{^}

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

8. ^{^}

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

9. ^{^}

   Cynthia L.S. Pury “Can Courage Be Learned” Positive Psychology: Exploring the Best in People v. 1 (2008) pp. 118–119, describing Pury et al. “Getting up the nerve: Self-reports of deliberate attempts to increase courage” (2006)

10. ^{^}

    Pury (2008) pp. 123–124, citing J. Wolpe Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition (1958)

11. ^{^}

    Pury (2008) p. 124