Too little
Borrowed decision
I will choose pottery so nobody thinks I am odd.
Approval replaces the purpose you wanted the course to serve.
Courage
Your friends have chosen a course. You still have a choice.
A willingness to face proportionate risk for a worthy purpose, guided by judgment.
Courage lets you act on a defensible judgment when fear of disapproval makes agreement tempting. You can listen seriously, consider the consequences and still choose a different course. Self-reliance becomes real at the moment you stop waiting for everyone to approve what you have reason to do. The aim is a worthwhile choice, not a reputation for being different.
Courage gives a considered choice before approval arrives
Your friends are signing up for pottery. You have wanted for years to understand the night sky, and the astronomy course fits your evenings. They make a cheerful case for joining them. You explain what you want to learn and put your astronomy form in the tray. The pottery brochures have an impressive majority, but they cannot attend the course for you. You would enjoy their company; you also want to give your own interest a serious chance.
How Courage is expressed
Physical Courage
Physical Courage faces bodily danger for a worthy end. A trained rescuer who enters a dangerous place to protect someone illustrates action guided by purpose, skill and judgment. Danger is a cost of that action, not its attraction; this page assigns no rescue challenge.
Moral Courage
Moral Courage faces social or personal costs for a defensible judgment: correcting a favored claim, refusing a dishonest shortcut, or expressing a considered disagreement. The action can be quiet and still matter. A person may value belonging and nevertheless speak or choose differently.
When risks overlap
A principled refusal can affect safety, livelihood and dependents as well as reputation. Consider who bears the cost and choose an appropriate way to act. Physical and moral expression share one virtue; greater exposure is not a higher practice level.
Finding the balance in Courage
An illustrative everyday situation
Choose the astronomy course you have reason to pursue while friends encourage you to join their pottery class.
A fitting response
Independent choice
I want to learn the sky. I will join you afterward.
You act on your reasons and leave the friendship room to contain a difference.
Pursued too far
Performing defiance
If everyone likes it, it cannot be worth doing.
Opposition has become another way of letting the group choose for you.
Other people can disagree without acquiring your vote.
When the situation changes
A friend points out that the astronomy course has a prerequisite you missed. Check it. A new reason can change your choice; their disappointment alone need not. Courage and revisability can belong to the same decision.
What Courage makes possible
You can begin work that matters to you, state a judgment in your own voice and let relationships survive a difference. Acting may make confidence more substantial because it gives you experience to judge. It can also leave an awkward evening or an unanswered objection. Courage does not require those costs to disappear before a choice becomes possible.
Courage in ordinary life
A different view
At a book discussion, explain the passage that led you to a different reading. Give the reasons without apologizing for having reached them.
A course of your own
Choose a study project for its purpose and fit with your life, even when another option would be easier to explain at a gathering.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discernment
Discernment examines whether the reasons are sound. Courage faces the fear that remains when it is time to act on them.
Fortitude
Courage may be needed to choose the unfamiliar course. Fortitude carries the work through later evenings when enthusiasm and applause are scarce.
Courage and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Automatic contrariness
Disagreeing to look independent is a counterfeit of Courage. Your reasons still depend on which way the crowd is facing.
Counterfeit: Approval as a prerequisite
Calling endless postponement prudent can disguise fear of being judged. Genuine Courage considers relevant consequences and then permits a decision.
How to cultivate Courage
Put the reason for your choice into one plain sentence.
Separate an objection that changes the facts from a reaction you find uncomfortable.
Take the step the reasons support, and remain answerable for its effects.
Try it today
Choose an ordinary decision you have been postponing for approval. State your reason, hear any relevant objection and make the choice that is yours to make. Use a situation without threats, confidential disclosure or consequences you cannot reasonably assess.
On your own terms
Make a defensible choice without waiting for universal approval.
Questions worth returning to
What would I choose if I did not need this choice to be admired?
Which objection would actually change my mind?
Keep the practice proportionate
Disagreement can carry real costs, including retaliation. Choose suitable timing and support; this exercise does not ask for a dangerous confrontation or disclosure.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
Mill describes social pressure that makes people conceal thought. Owning a considered view and acting on it gives moral courage something worthwhile to do.
It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is rare.
Stevenson is praising a person willing to state an unfashionable response to art. The insight is the difficulty of owning a considered view, not that every contrary opinion is courageous.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · Self-Reliance · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson joins independence with sweetness in company. Choosing the astronomy course can preserve both a person’s purpose and their warmth toward friends choosing pottery.
Valour is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of our horse or our arms but in our own.
Montaigne distinguishes courage from equipment and outward force. The page likewise permits a trembling voice; it does not prescribe imitating the essay’s accounts of warfare.
I wrote an answer to his letter, thank'd him for his advice, but stated my reasons for quitting Boston fully and in such a light as to convince him I was not so wrong as he had apprehended.
Franklin describes explaining himself to his brother-in-law. Stating reasons can coexist with respect for advice; the historical departure is not a recommended model for a reader’s circumstances.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Emerson gives self-trust a ringing voice within his religious account of individual vocation. On this page, it supports acting on a considered purpose while friends choose differently.
But let any modern London merchant venture to walk along Cornhill in a peaked Chinese hat, and he will find it takes some degree of moral courage to persevere in it.
Smiles uses conspicuous dress to show the pressure of an audience. It is a useful limit case: unusual dress can provoke fear, but mere eccentricity is not enough to establish an ethically worthy purpose.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A small choice can give you something useful to practice.