Moral Courage
President's Letter from Rushworth M. Kidder
(For the full White Paper, click
here -- requires Adobe Acrobat)
July, 2001
Dear Fellow Institute for Global Ethics Member:
Like most independent schools, St. Paul's School for Boys posts athletic
schedules on its Web site. Click on it, and you'll still find the
list of this spring's baseball games, tennis matches, and crew events
from its campus in suburban Baltimore.
But not lacrosse. Not this spring. Despite being ranked No. 1 in
a nationwide lacrosse poll earlier this year, this prestigious 151-year-old
institution cancelled its entire varsity season on April 3.
That day, headmaster Robert W. Hallett met for 20 minutes with a
group of parents and with the varsity team-many of whom had been drawn
to the school because of its reputation as a lacrosse power-to announce
the cancellation.
The reason? Earlier in the spring, a 16-year-old team member had
a sexual tryst with a 15-year-old girl from another private school-and,
without her knowledge, videotaped the whole thing. He was apparently
mimicking a sequence in American Pie (a movie some of the students
had recently seen and discussed) where a character videos a sexual
encounter and puts it on the Web. When this student's teammates gathered
at a player's home to look at what they thought would be game tapes
of an upcoming rival, they saw his tape instead.
None of the teammates objected. Nobody tried to stop the showing.
Instead, they watched.
You can imagine the soul-searching among board and staff members
leading up to that announcement. Lacrosse-a game played on a soccer-like
field with a small ball hurled from long sticks with nets on the ends-is
Canada's national summer sport and has a strong following among East
Coast prep schools and colleges in the United States. At St. Paul's
it has a 60-year history and solid alumni support. But the school,
affiliated with the Episcopal Church, still requires chapel for its
students and retains a serious tradition of ethical concern. What
do you do when a popular sport crosses swords with an ethical collapse?
In this case, the answer was clear. The boy who made the tape was
expelled. Thirty varsity players were suspended for three days and
sent into counseling with the school's chaplain and psychologist.
And eight junior varsity players were made to sit out the rest of
the season.
This is a story about moral courage-a lack of it among teammates
who failed to object to the tape, and the expression of it by an administration
that took a formidable public stand where in other schools it might
have slid past with perfunctory penalties.
"At a minimum," Hallett wrote to parents, "we should
expect each boy here will, in the future, have the courage to stand
up for, to quote the Lower School prayer, 'The hard right against
the easy wrong.'"
What, exactly, is moral courage? It's a question we've been pondering
here at the Institute. In recent months, we've noticed an increasing
inclination among our seminar participants to mention "courage"
as they set about defining their core moral values. It's a word they
want to list along with honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness,
and compassion. And while it's not a synonym for any of those others,
it shares with them a family likeness. But does it really belong in
the same category? There's no question that courage is hugely important.
But is it a different kind of concept from those other five values?
To sort through those questions, we're currently preparing a white
paper on moral courage-what it is, what it does, where it comes from,
why it matters, and so forth. That paper is still in the works. But
here are some preliminary observations:
1) Moral courage is different from physical courage. Physical courage
is the willingness to face serious risk to life or limb instead
of fleeing from it. "Courage," says my 1926 Webster's,
is "that quality of mind which enables one to encounter danger
and difficulties with firmness, or without fear, or fainting of
heart." General William T. Sherman, after whom the tank is
named, called it "a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger
and a mental willingness to endure it." John Wayne put it with
characteristic bluntness: "Courage is being scared to death-and
saddling up anyway." Sir Ernest Shackleton, seeking adventurers
to join him on his South Pole exploration, described it nicely in
an advertisement:
Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold,
long months of complete darkness-constant danger, safe return
doubtful-honor and recognition in case of success.
2) Physical courage is less in demand than it once was. Where once
the frontier loomed mysterious and uncharted, global positioning
satellites now take us right to our mark. And where once beasts,
bugs, underbrush, storms, and topographical obstacles made travel
dangerous, there is less now to fear-and less need for physical
courage. Even war, which Artistotle thought was the only place to
find true courage, has become less dependent on the physical courage
of the individual warrior and more dependent on technology, information,
and weaponry launched from a safe distance.
3) Yet the lessons of courage are still needed, especially among
youth seeking tests of adulthood and rites of passage into maturity.
At their best, this need may explain the popularity of the contrived
risk-taking of extreme sports and some high-risk financial ventures-and,
at its worst, the prevalence of risky sexual behavior, drug use,
and gang activity. It's as though we were saying, "If nature,
war, and survival are not going to test my courage, I'll find other
ways, for I need to prove to myself and others that I really am
courageous!"
4) Moral courage is not about facing physical challenges that could
harm the body. It's about facing mental challenges that could harm
one's reputation, emotional well-being, self-esteem, or other characteristics.
These challenges, as the term implies, are deeply connected with
our moral sense-our core moral values. Pass the white light of moral
courage through the prism of our understanding of values, and it
breaks out into a five-banded spectrum: the courage to be honest,
to be fair, to be respectful, to be responsible, and to be compassionate.
If "values" is in some way synonymous with "convictions,"
then moral courage is (as it's often characterized) "the courage
of your convictions" in these five key areas.
5) That suggests why courage is not quite like the other values.
Rather than being the next pearl on a string with the other five,
moral courage is something that enables the others to be effective.
Maybe it's the string itself. Maybe it's the catalyst that speeds
up the reaction times of the others. Maybe it's the hardware upon
which the software of the other values operates. Whatever the metaphor,
courage seems a necessary element in the ethics equation. What good
is a conviction about honesty or fairness if there is no willingness
to put them into action in the face of adversity? Of what use is
a code of ethics that hangs on the wall, unimplemented? Without
the courage to act, virtuous conviction is pointless and paralytic.
6) Yet courage without virtuous conviction is empty-or perverse.
The Mafia hit-man needs physical courage, of course, to wreak mayhem
among the innocent. But he also needs a kind of "immoral"
courage to implement a cluster of distinctly bad values-self-seeking,
lust, revenge, wrath, and others of the Seven Deadlies. Or think
of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. One of his lawyers,
Richard Burr, tried to paint him with the colors of moral courage.
For years, he said, his client had been "deeply concerned about
the overreaching of federal law enforcement authorities. When that
overreach became apparent to him in his own case, it overrode other
considerations." Yet McVeigh showed little respect for others,
and no compassion for his victims. The only responsibility he felt,
apparently, was to take the law into his own hands, subverting justice
and fairness. And his dishonesty showed up in the various deceptions
he pursued to meet his ends. Hard to see anything moral or ethical
here, though he had an odd sort of daring and bravado.
7) But must every evidence of courage be thought of as true moral
courage? Here Aristotle's conceptions help. He defined moral virtue
as an "intermediate" between a defect and an excess. Courage,
he said, lay balanced between the defect of cowardice and the excess
of rashness. Put another way, one can think of courage as flanked
by two alternatives: its opposite, the cowering timidity that dares
not act, and its counterfeit, the bravura and foolhardiness that
looks a bit like courage but isn't. Moral courage, then, has built
into it a moderating restraint. If it falls backwards, it becomes
its own negative. If it lapses into excess, it turns into a caricature
of itself.
8) Like the five core values, however, courage is built by practice
and repetition. Think of it as a habit, or a muscle, that gets strengthened
by use. "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every
experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face,"
wrote Eleanor Roosevelt. "You are able to say to yourself,
'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes
along.' The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring
to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it
will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every
time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
Moral courage, then, has four salient characteristics:
· It is the courage to be moral-to act with fairness, respect,
responsibility, honesty, and compassion even when the risks of doing
so are substantial.
· It requires a conscious awareness of those risks. The sleepwalker
on the ridgepole is not courageous unless, waking up, he or she
perceives the danger and goes forward anyway.
· It is never formulaic or automatic, but requires constant
vigilance against its opposite (moral timidity) and its counterfeit
(moral foolhardiness).
· It can be promoted, encouraged, and taught through precept,
example, and practice.
That final point explains the actions of the educators at St. Paul's.
They already had a precept-"the hard right against the easy wrong"-to
use as a reference point for testing the actions of the team. They
must have known the value of examples-known that a Hollywood movie
can poison budding moral sensibilities, and that in the absence of
a strong ethical antidote the poison can do permanent damage. And
as for practice, that was essential. They were building, over time,
a tradition of moral education just as they were building a reputation
for lacrosse. Yes, they sacrificed the short-term glory of a sterling
athletic season and the financial support it could bring. But the
long-term risk of educational hypocrisy-talking up values without
walking down the road to integrity-would have been far more damaging.
In the annals of moral courage, this is a small story. It's not about
a whistleblower, an investigative journalist, a researcher finding
an unpopular truth, or the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
But its very smallness is telling. Moral courage plays itself out
daily, hourly, in the interstices of our lives. Without it, our brightest
virtues rust from lack of use. With it, we build piece by piece a
more ethical world.
And, at times, reap unexpected successes. By late April, the Boston
Globe was already reporting rumors that admissions inquiries at St.
Paul's were up from previous years. Which may suggest that while lacrosse
is a big draw, moral courage is even bigger.
Sincerely,
Rushworth M. Kidder
Martha Bracy helped research these ideas
