The virtue of courage /
The contributors to this volume offer new insights on Aristotelian perspectives of courage, as well as Stoic, Confucian, Christian or Thomist, Jewish, and African perspectives of the virtue. They offer important observations about the communal, ethnic, and religious elements of courage. They ask wha...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Series: | Virtues (Oxford University Press)
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | The contributors to this volume offer new insights on Aristotelian perspectives of courage, as well as Stoic, Confucian, Christian or Thomist, Jewish, and African perspectives of the virtue. They offer important observations about the communal, ethnic, and religious elements of courage. They ask what place courage has in healthcare or contemporary career development, and how courage might be applied by ordinary citizens as well as by leaders in contemporary liberal democracies. These essays make it clear that reflections on courage are highly salient in a world that is experiencing global political unrest and profound uncertainty about the future. |
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| Abstract: | "Courage (or bravery) occupies a double role as a virtue. First, as defined by Aristotle, it is a moral virtue in its own right and indeed one of the most important ones. Second, it serves as a facilitator of other virtues. A person who cannot say boo to a goose would not be able to display the virtue of justice, for example, in challenging situations. So, justice needs courage as an enabler. There is nothing unique about this double role; the virtue of friendship also plays both an intrinsic and extrinsic role in the good life. However, for a number of different reasons, such as Aristotle's own lack of focus on the enabling role of courage, the assumption that the enabling virtues form a category distinct from the moral virtues, and the rise of moral anti-realism in social science, current character education (even when seen as the practical application of virtue ethics) now avails itself of a separate category of “performance virtues,” like grit, resilience, and self-confidence. Neo-Aristotelians tend to look askance at those capacities, because of their amoral and instrumentalist nature; yet many have reluctantly expanded their concept of virtue by taking this category onboard. The present chapter argues that neo-Aristotelian character educators could say most of what they want to say about the enablers of virtue by bringing in courage as an enabling moral virtue. What cannot be explained as the workings of an enabling moral virtue, while still performing an enabling function, could be consigned to the category of technical or psychological skills (techné), thus helping reluctant expansionists to dispose of the term “performance virtue""-- Provided by publisher. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xxxii, 327 pages). |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197660058 9780197660034 9780197660041 0197660053 0197660037 0197660045 |