Philosophy: Searching For Courage Together: A Socially Scaffolded Account for Embodied Beings Like Us

Join the Department of Philosophy for the lecture by Sara Protasi, associate professor of philosophy at University of Puget Sound 

Abstract:

In this talk I defend an empirically-grounded account of courage as an Aristotelian virtue. After a brief historical review, I present a view recently developed by Gopal Sreenivasan (2022), according to which courage is perseverance in the face of danger when and because the perseverance is worthwhile. I show that the account succeeds in solving a number of longstanding debates. Namely, it illuminates how fear regulation is involved in courage; why we judge cowardice as ethically worse than rashness; and how we can avoid the collapse of courage as a proper, wholehearted virtue into mere self-control. However, I argue that this view is not fully satisfying, insofar as it offers a highly idealized and intellectual picture of the courageous agent, and is completely silent on the mechanisms through which we manage to regulate our fears. Fear’s behavioral outputs and expressions constitute the most vivid reminder that we are made of flesh and blood (and guts). Relatedly, we are social beings, and social-scientific and historical evidence shows that courage is often acquired collectively, felt jointly, and scaffolded socially.