Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of the distinction between physical and moral courage by February 1st, a panel of users will pick the winner, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
Once again I find myself pondering a question, and without a good answer. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The prompt is: What is the distinction between Physical Courage and Moral Courage?
Physical courage can be defined broadly as bravery in the face of physical risk of bodily harm, pain, or death. The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris. The ability to put one’s body on the line without flinching.
Moral courage can be defined broadly as recognizing and doing the right thing in the face of social disapproval, against the flow of opinions and our social programming, often in disobedience to figures of authority. Moral courage is the courage demonstrated by a conscientious objector who refuses to serve in the military, by a whistleblower who points out to his boss’ boss the electrical problems in the building before it catches fire, by a woman who expresses a political opinion likely to negatively impact her career, by the true friends who stand by people in their life even when others judge them for their friendship, by the lover who marries someone his family or her society disapproves of and chooses love over an easy life. People who do the right thing even when it goes against what they were taught and what authority figures have told them.
I think the contrast is best brought to the fore in this Tim O’Brien story from his excellent The Things They Carried (audio, scan here ) I highly recommend reading the whole thing it isn’t long, but I’ll offer the philosophical highlights here:
This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife, To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now I'll adrnit, the story makes me squirm, For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough - if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough - I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future. In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated.
Tim then travels to a river on the Canadian border, hires an elderly guide to take him out on a boat on a desolate portion of the river, where he can swim across to Canada and dodge the draft and the morally abhorrent war in Vietnam. When faced with the ultimate choice to flee, however, he chokes. He can’t do it.
Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away frorn rny hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of rnyself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream...I couldn't get my breath; I couldnt stay afloat; I couldnt tell which way to swim. A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel. I saw my Parents calling to out from the far shore,. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers. My girlfriends and high school buddies. Like some weird sporting event... A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts and uncles were there, and Abraham Lincoln, and Saint George, and a nine year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in fifth grade, and several members pf the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who were later to die - villagers with terrible burns' little kids without arms or legs - Yes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War... people in hard hats, people in headbands - they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other. I saw faces from rny distant past and distant future. My wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and down, and a drill sergeant named Blyton sneered and shot up a finger and shook his head. There was a choir in bright purple robes. There was a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe’...
All those eyes on me - the town, the whole universe - and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my Iife, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried...The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the Prairie, and then to Vietnam’ where I was a soldier, and then home again, I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
And I’ve been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and something the author emphasizes is the acquiescence of the army, over occasional moral squeamishness, to obedience to Hitler and the Nazi ideology. These men were physically brave in ways that most of us would barely comprehend, many were WWI combat veterans, many more would distinguish themselves bravely in WWII. Almost every one of them showed physical courage and a devotion to duty, almost none of them would have the moral courage to choose not to participate in the Nazi takeover, or in Nazi atrocities, both of which would doom the German people. Contrary to popular belief, few if any German soldiers were ever punished for refusing to participate in atrocities, Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners cites a handful of examples of officers who were told to execute civilians, refused, and faced no consequences. That they faced no consequences is fascinating, even the other Nazis recognized murdering civilians as work that some soldiers might refuse to do and that’s just fine; that there were few who refused, despite the lack of consequences is also telling. They simply obeyed, even absent credible threats.
Or consider what Hemingway said in For Whom The Bell Tolls when describing the courage of his protagonist “[t]his was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. [Maria said] 'I will not keep it from you then. The Pilar told me that we would all die tomorrow and that you know it as well as she does and that you give it no importance. She said this not in criticism but in admiration.’
That’s a certain definition of courage that is unifying, the courage to ignore possible bad outcomes in favor of the odds, or of duty, or of the mission. But even then there is a distinction between the physical and the moral that seems to come up. Or even again the economic, the monetary gamble.
Or, as yet another example, consider this magnificent exchange in The Magnificent Seven (I don’t recall if there is a similar line in Kurosawa, or if this was original):
Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are... cowards.
[O'Reilly takes the boy over his knee and spanks him]
O'Reilly : [harshly] Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards! You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.
We have the distinction again, between the courage to fight and maybe die, and the courage to do one’s duty, to take on responsibility against risk, of investing carefully, husbanding the resources and the land and hoping. The moral courage to take on responsibility and to hope for the future, to keep the fire burning against all odds.
And that all has me thinking: what is the distinction? Is much of what we see as physical courage obedience to training, the football player isn’t brave when he charges into the fray he is just following what he was told to do? Or is it stupidity, a pigheaded refusal to understand the bad things that could happen? Is there a valuable distinction at all between physical and moral courage, or it sophistry, a cope for weak men to claim some possible moral superiority? Where does a gambler’s courage, a Wall Street speculator’s courage fit in? Where does workaday courage fit in, the courage to take on responsibility, to do one’s duty every single day, to take care of one’s family? The courage to give up other possibilities and commit, to settle down? Are all these types of courage the same, do they all build off one another, or are they cognate but distinct, or are they sometimes foreign to one another?
Take this prompt in the direction that you will, anything broadly related will be considered. I chose to offer a more detailed prompt after complaints last time that the prompt was too broad. Feel free to bring in outside sources, particularly obscure or older works that might not be well known, while I am looking for original work that does not mean that you can’t use citations, or even present someone else’s thesis with your own unique justification or defense of it.
The basic rules of the competition are thus:
-- Write an effort-post answering the question: What is the distinction between Physical Courage and Moral Courage?
-- Standalone or in the CW or in side threads, it can even be as a reply to another top level comment; only rule is that it is on the motte and the it is high effort.
-- On-Topic will be interpreted broadly, but I’m loathe to create any formal rules that might open opportunities for people to troll me about it, suffice to say that if one or more members of the selection committee feel your essay is out of bounds it is unlikely to win. If you're making a good faith effort to write about the topic, it is unlikely that it will be penalized.
-- Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation, defense, or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 2nd, as long as we have at least three entries, the selection committee will convene and select a winner whose chosen charity will receive $200. If there are seven or more entries, we will also select a runner up, whose charity will receive $100.
— Once we have the winner(s), I will work with the winner(s) to select a charity, and I will donate to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund (Is this itself an example of my lack of moral courage?) just because somebody wins a contest. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? I did it last time, but beyond that, you don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Something you realize about physical courage once you've experienced or been around it for a bit is that it's something of a cheap thing.
The following line might be a bit cliche but I think it's cliche for a reason. Dying for something is easy, it's living with it that's hard.
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
Conversely, I think I think you might be trying to paint it as more different than it is.
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
Yes, in other words, "something of a cheap thing".
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
Living with the long-term injuries and the PTSD. By contrast, ending up dead is a relatively easy out.
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
The argument is that the act itself, the moment of decision, is cheap. The expensive part is living with the consequences as they grind away, moment by moment, for years without respite.
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Lin Manuel Miranda?!? You've been behind Hlynka the entire time?!?
(I say, tongue planted firmly in cheek).
No, but that annotation is exactly what I'm getting at.
The impulse to "die young and leave a beautiful corpse" vs making a choice to stick things out and put in the work.
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This if written as an effortpost would be interesting.
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Once again, I hate the prompt. I think it heavily favors wordcels and forces upon a world model on the author.
Write something vaguely related to the primary topic, then. I tried to flesh out something more detailed and provide a jumping off point this time specifically to address the complaint of vagueness. You're certainly welcome to argue against the prompt in your essay, to argue that the postulates underlying it are false.
I really don't see how one creates an essay contest they does not favor people who like words.
Cut it down to the tl;dr: you started with. And the prompt headline. And maybe a quick encouragement along the lines of "Make your point and be brief.".
I for one had to quit before even finishing reading the OP.
That's why I wrote the TLDR, you can literally just choose to do that.
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Does a charitable donation to funding an organization for struggling Indian doctors count? I assure you that the rather strict eligibility requirements that rule out everyone but one person in the subcontinent are a strict necessity, but for anyone who isn't an EA I can't imagine that's a deal breaker ;)
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