This post examines the virtue of courage and explores some practical strategies for becoming more courageous.

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 also undergirds other virtues:

“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.” ―C.S. Lewis^[1]
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ―Maya Angelou^[2]

Fear and Our Response to It

Courage has to do with our response to risk and fear. This response has at least three components:

The way we judge how threatening a situation is—how easily spooked we are (emotional) and how sensible our risk assessment is (cognitive).
How we act when we are immediately confronted with a frightening scenario—how well we think and perform while afraid.
How we respond to the risk 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 put yourself in a situation in which you run the risk of harm. 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. Similar 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.

Must Courage Be Directed toward Worthy Goals?

Many people believe 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 for the thrill of it, or in quixotic but hopeless defiance, or merely by remaining unruffled) and that goal must be worthwhile.^[3] People also tend to consider an act to be more courageous if it is successful.^[4]

Is there One Courage or Many?

There are two curiously contrasting scenarios that people commonly describe as courageous:

A person does something unusually risky and high-stakes in a confident, uninhibited, and fearless way.
A person, confronted by something that frightens them (whether or not it is in fact very risky), holds firm and confronts what they fear rather than retreating from it.

These are different enough that I wonder if they really describe the same sort of thing. The first describes someone who does something that seems frightful by common consensus, but who is not afraid. The second describes someone who does something that may seem banal to outsiders (holding a tarantula, speaking in public) but has to conquer their fear to do so. Each can be called “courageous” but they seem to exercise different skills.^[5]

In much of what I have read 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 someone who behaves bravely when threatened with disease or impoverishment was in the same ballpark.^[6]

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 face an inconvenient truth, or the “moral courage” it takes to stand up for what you know is right in the face of social disapproval.^[7]

But it may be that when you stretch “courage” to cover so much territory, you no longer describe a single virtue. I noticed this from Zach Weinersmith, who was researching the history of space exploration for his book A City on Mars:

“For the space book, I am reading about people in extreme environments. Interesting thing: bravery is not cross contextual. You can be a brave mountaineer and still not brave at social situations.”―Zach Weinersmith

Counterfeit Courages

Rashness

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,^[8] 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).^[9]

Braggadocio

People without real courage often try to fake courage in social situations. 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.^[10]

Fleeing from a Greater Fear to a Lesser One

Another form of counterfeit courage is exhibited by someone forced to to choose between fearful things—for example, a soldier who goes “bravely” to battle but only because he fears being shot for desertion or being disgraced in his community.

Some motivational “hacks” seem to rely on this sort of thing (e.g. set up a scenario in which if you fail to do some frightening thing, $100 is donated in your name to something you would be horrified to be associated with).

Unfrightening a Situation

Another way to resolve fear side-steps the issue of cowardice or courage by making the fearful situation less fearful. You might, for example, increase your competence: if you have a fear of public speaking, you could participate in Toastmasters, a non-threatening environment in which to practice public speaking skills. As your abilities improve, so does your confidence, and what was fear-inducing no longer is.

This in a way is a form of counterfeit courage (Aristotle said, for example, that in a storm, sailors were not exhibiting more courage than their terrified passengers, but merely a better handle on the situation).^[9] On the other hand, this method meets a frightening situation head-on and proves your mastery over it, which strikes me as potentially a helpful way of bolstering courage.

Mere Bravery

If you subscribe to the belief that the virtue of courage is exhibited not by mere bravery, but bravery in the service of worthwhile goals, then other forms of counterfeit courage include foolish courage (bravely doing something not worth the risk) and bad courage (bravely doing something actually harmful).^[11]

Becoming Courageous

Physiological, Cognitive, and Behavioral Handles

Zach Weinersmith, in his note above, cited the book Extreme: Why some people thrive at the limits.^[12] That book concludes that “We all have a greater capacity to be brave than we sometimes appreciate” and identifies three elements of the fear response—“physiological, cognitive, and behavioral”—each of which has handles we can learn to manipulate in order to take more conscious control over how we respond to fear (and thereby develop more courage):

If you are observant of your physiological response to fear, you can 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.
If you assess risk rationally, you save your anxiety for situations that deserve it.
With deliberation and practice, you can adjust how you respond while in fearful or anxiety-provoking situations.

Consider Courage as a Terminal, not Merely Instrumental, Value

A suggestion from the Aristotelian tradition is that you consider courage a valuable end in itself, 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 reinforcing reward you receive).

Insights from Positive Psychology

Christopher Peterson’s and Martin E.P. Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues reviews the literature on courage and concludes:

Bravery can be promoted by practice (moral habit), by example (modeling), and by developing certain attributes of the individual (self-confidence) or group (cohesion).^[13]

The VIA Institute on Character, associated with Peterson & Seligman, makes the virtue courage out to be a cluster of “strengths”: bravery, honesty (authenticity in particular), perseverance, and zest. Later work in that vein found evidence for the first three, but thought hope and kindness were better than zest at characterizing actions people describe as courageous.^[14]

Pop-Psychology / Self-Help Approaches

Peterson & Seligman also summarize the (not particularly well-tested, but intuitively appealing) pop-psychology approaches to improving courage, such as Tony Robbins’s 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.^[13]

Strengthen Harmonious Virtues

Other virtues may come to the assistance of courage. For example:

With hope or optimism, you may be more brave because positive potential consequences of your bravery are more salient than they would be otherwise.
Endurance helps you put up with fear, or gives you more confidence that you can get through the worst of whatever fearful thing you are up against.
Loyalty, honor, or duty add to the value of your courageousness or the costs of your cowardice, and so may lead indirectly to bravery.
Self-control helps you regulate your response to fear so that it does not immediately carry you away.

Sometimes it is clear to us when we are being influenced by fear (we tremble as we approach the podium). But other times we may hide from ourselves the fact that we are acting out of fear, perhaps from vanity. Rather than acknowledging that we are frightened, we rationalize our timid behavior in some other way, pretending not to notice that fear has its fingers on the scale of our rationalizations. For this reason, virtues like humility, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness can come to the aid of courage.

What Courageous People Actually Do to Boost Their Courage

Researchers asked subjects to describe a time when they acted courageously, and asked them whether they had done something 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%.^[15]

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.

Exposure Therapy

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

Deliberate Fear-Calming Exercises

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.^[16]

Anger Distracts You From Fear

Righteous anger—particularly when it is emotionally raw—can both motivate you to overcome your fear, and (albeit irrationally) promote optimism about the results of the actions you plan to take on anger’s behalf, which can make such a response seem less frightening.^[17]

Reflect on Your Courageous Acts

Some evidence suggests that you can boost your courage by reflecting on and writing about past occasions in which you faced your fears.^[18]

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.

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C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), letter ⅩⅩⅨ
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Maya Angelou, Meeting Dr. Du Bois (audio interview by Krista Tippett, 2014)
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e.g. Douglas N. Walton “The Virtue of Courage” The Recovery of Virtue (1987) p. 602
The assertion that a courageous action must have a good goal 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.
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 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—it can be attributed instead to selfish desire outweighing fear. If you do something similar but without any hope of personal gain, this is more likely to be interpreted as courageous. And it is easier to imagine taking such risks in the service of values you consider good. 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.
See also
- C.L.S. Pury, C.B. Starkey, & L.R. Olson “Value of goal predicts accolade courage: more evidence that courage is taking a worthwhile risk” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2024)
- Philippa Foot “Virtues and Vices” Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978), section Ⅲ
Foot thinks maybe we can say something like courage is a virtue, but not all displays of courage exhibit this, in the same way that we might say that arsenic is a poison, but that in some circumstance (e.g. semiconductor manufacture) it is not acting as a poison but in some other capacity.
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Cynthia L.S. Pury & Autumn D. Hensel “Are Courageous Actions Successful Actions?” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2010)
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Pury, et al., call the first general courage and the second personal courage.
Cynthia L.S. Pury, Robin M. Kowalski, & Jana Spearman “Distinctions Between General and Personal Courage” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2007)
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅲ.6
Plato’s Socrates did not have this same hesitation. In Laches he considers “not only who are courageous in war, but who are courageous in perils by sea, and who in disease, or in poverty, or again in politics, are courageous; and not only who are courageous against pain or fear, but mighty to contend against desires and pleasures…”
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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.
Cynthia L.S. Pury, et al. (“Courage, Courageous Acts, and Positive Psychology” Positive Psychology: Established and Emerging Issues 2017 p. 159), identify some more varieties, and suggest “that the best way to understand these distinctions is to look at the specific goals and risks involved. Because these goal–risk pairs commonly co-occur in nature, we speculate, society and researchers have labeled different types of courage.”
^{^}
See, for example, Marissa Fessenden, “This Woman Can’t Feel Fear” Smithsonian, 21 January 2015
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅲ.6
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William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Bassanio speaking, Act 3, Scene 2)
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Pury, et al. (2017) p. 161
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Emma Barrett and Paul Martin, Extreme: Why some people thrive at the limits (2014)
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Christopher Peterson & Martin E.P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues (2004), pp. 221, 226
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Cynthia L.S. Pury & Robin M. Kowalski “Human Strengths, Courageous Actions, and General and Personal Courage” Journal of Positive Psychology (2007)
^{^}
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)
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Pury (2008) pp. 123–124, citing J. Wolpe Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition (1958)
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Jennifer S. Lerner & Larissa Z. Tiedens “Portrait of the Angry Decision Maker: Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger’s Influence on Cognition” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (2006)
Pury (2008) p. 124
Anna Halmburger, Anna Baumert, & Manfred Schmitt “Anger as driving factor of moral courage in comparison with guilt and global mood: A multimethod approach” European Journal of Social Psycholovy (2014)
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Amanda Kramer & Richard Zinbarg “Recalling courage: An initial test of a brief writing intervention to activate a ‘courageous mindset’ and courageous behavior” The Journal of Positive Psychology (2018)