The Apparent Disunity of Courage

Abstract Though courage is widely regarded as a core virtue, there is controversy over what kinds of acts are courageous. Moreover, some see courageous acts as necessarily good, whereas others believe that some acts can be both courageous and bad. This chapter examines this disagreement and argues that it largely rests on two sorts of confusion or misunderstanding. The first regards differences in the descriptor under which the act is seen; acts can be comprehended under several different descriptors, all of which may be appropriate but support different courage evaluations. The second involves differences in uses of the term “courage”: the term serves two fundamentally different functions and involves two different concepts. One, process courage, is the use of the term to refer to the psychological mechanisms or processes whereby people act in the face of risk for perceived good. The other, accolade courage, is a form of acknowledgment—the use of the term to draw attention to the action or the actor and commend one or the other. The chapter identifies various sorts of support for this process/accolade distinction. It concludes by outlining several important contributions these distinctions offer for research and social debate. Attention to differences in descriptors and functions of the term courage will improve both research and social discourse on the virtue of courage.