The movie American Sniper has started some arguments about who is courageous and who is a coward. But I think those arguments are on the wrong track. The question I have is whether courage is a virtue.
Physical courage is actually more common than people realize.history has many examples of large numbers of soldiers, in the millions by the 20th century, risking death in battle. There are also many other examples of physical courage, explorers going into the unknown, test pilots and astronauts flying into danger, even ambitious teenagers doing risky things to impress other teenagers. I think the thing that these people have in common is that they feel there is social support for what they are doing. It has become commonplace now that at the moment of battle, soldiers do not fight for cause or country near as much as they fight to support their buddies. The social need for some people to be physically courageous leads to people to think of courage as a virtue.
But what if physical courage is used in a bad cause, or by bad people? Adolf Hitler was decorated for bravery in World War I, and his henchman Hermann Goering was a fighter ace in that war. The Nazis would never have conquered all the countries they did if their soldiers had not fought bravely. The Japanese were famous for fighting to the death, the same soldiers who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking would have been willing to die for the Emperor. There are many other cases where criminals or terrorists on large or small scales have been willing to take great risks to do crimes.
If physical courage can be used for evil ends, is courage a virtue? Courage is needed to accomplish some ends, but it can be used to accomplish bad ends as well as good ones.
You probably noticed that I keep qualifying courage as physical courage. That is because physical courage is usually shown by people who expect the people they live with to approve what they are doing. A much rarer kind of courage is to defy your social expectations. Moral courage happens when a person decides that his culture or social group is wrong and needs to change, and tries to make that change happen. A white man in some parts of Mississippi in 1960 would have had a very hard time declaring that the civil rights movement was right and segregation was wrong. He would have been risking physical danger and social ostracism. A person in that situation might have to leave the social group he is in and find another. A person who declares they no longer believe in the religion they were brought up in is in social danger. In some times or places he would be in physical danger as well.
The advantage of American diversity is that a person can find social support for what they believe in from some group. If your a pacifist, a religious believer or non-believer, a vegetarian, or whatever, you can find others who believe as you do. If you are a fascist, bigot, or a religious extremist, you can also find support. How to get to a social consensus that is just and free is an unsolved problem.
I want to bring up an example of some people who were not physically courageous.
In World War II, the Italian Army, with occasional exceptions, performed poorly. The average Italian soldier was not motivated to fight hard for Mussolini, Hitler, and the often corrupt and incompetent leadership they had. They surrendered easily. I think they were absolutely right to act as they did. Why should they have died for Fascist dictators who needlessly started aggressive wars?
That brings up an interesting question. How responsible should the average soldier be for going to war when that war might be a bad idea? A lot of Americans joined the military after the 9/11 attacks because they wanted to fight against the terrorists who did that crime. I think most of them sincerely believed that by fighting in Iraq they were doing just that. They are willing to risk their lives to do what they believe is defending our country. I believe that the Iraq invasion was a huge mistake, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that it not only did nothing to fight terrorism, but the invasion and some of the associated events such as Abu Ghraib greatly increased the appeal of violent jihadism. But a soldier has to go where he is sent. How can the average soldier, trying to do his best for his country and his buddies, make judgements on this sort of question? Most soldiers are young people without a lot of knowledge about the rest of the world, they are obliged to follow orders, and have no choice but to take their leader's word that what they are doing is right.
So I do not blame the average soldier. They were courageous in risking their lives for what they thought was right. I do blame and hope that someday the whole nation will blame the leadership who started the Iraq War, Guantanamo, and the torture program.