Courage has been described as a human virtue by philosophers across time and cultures (e.g., Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005;Miller, 2002). It figures prominently in positive psychology's science of virtue (e.g., Peterson & Seligman, 2004), and interest in courage as a topic of psychological study has grown with the field of positive psychology. However, what psychologists mean by the term courage has varied, and this variation has important consequences for understanding the construct. We therefore asked ourselves the following questions: Do we see courage as rare, lofty, and worthy of societal acknowledgment, which we view as part of courage as an accolade, or do we see courage as something that occurs many times in the typical person's life, a process, perhaps the process, by which people overcome subjectively felt risks for compelling reasons? Though desirable, most of the acts that fall under this second type of courage, which we call courage as a process, may pass unnoticed by observers and are not typically deserving of societal recognition.Courage can be defined in many ways. Norton and Weiss (2009) described courage as "persistence or perseverance despite having fear" (p. 214, emphasis in the original). Pury and Woodard (2009) defined it as "the intentional pursuit of a worthy goal despite the perception of personal threat and uncertain outcome" (p. 247). Peterson and Seligman (2004) defined courage as "emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal" (p. 29). Finally, in the most comprehensive study of the definition of courage, Rate, Clarke, Lindsay, and Sternberg (2007) used a multimethod approach to develop a definition of courage as "(a) a willful, intentional act, (b) executed after mindful deliberation, (c) involving objective substantial risk to the actor, (d) primarily motivated to bring about a noble good or worthy end, (e) despite, perhaps, the emotion of fear" (p. 95).The first two definitions focus on courage as a process. In Pury and Woodard's (2009) work the definition is general. Pury and Woodard highlighted the importance of the worth of the goal and two unknowns-risk to the actor and completion of the task-without any particular behavioral or emotional response described. Norton and Weiss's (2009) definition is directed at the specific case of predicting performance during an exposure-like exercise for phobias. 67
Aristotle has famously made the claim that having the right emotion at the right time is an essential part of moral virtue. Why might this be the case? I consider five possible relations between emotion and virtue and argue that an adequate answer to this question involves the epistemic status of emotion, that is, whether the perceptual awareness and hence the understanding of the object of emotion is like or unlike the perceptual awareness of an unemotional awareness of the same object. If an emotional awareness does not have a unique character, then it is unlikely that emotions provide an understanding that is different from unemotional states of awareness: they are perhaps little more than "hotblooded" instances of the same understanding. If, on the other hand, an emotional state involves a perceptual awareness that is unique to the emotion, then emotions are cognitively significant, providing an understanding of the object of the emotion that is absent in a similar but unemotional episode of awareness. I argue the latter and substantiate the claim that emotions are essential to moral virtue because they can be essential to a full understanding of the situations that they involve. In such cases, emotions are not merely a symptom of the possession of an adequate understanding, but are rather necessary for having an adequate understanding.Aristotle has famously made the claim in the Nicomachean Ethics that having the right emotion at the right time is an essential part of virtue. He believes that:It is moral virtue that is concerned with emotions and actions, and it is in emotions and actions that excess, deficiency and the median are found. Thus we can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience this at the right
There has been significant debate over both the imiplications and the merit of Leopold's land ethic. I consider the two most prominent objections and a resolution to them. One of these objections is that, far from being an alternative to an “economic” or cost‐benefit perspective on environmental issues, Leopold's land ethic merely broadens the range of economic considerations to be used in addressing such issues. The other objection is that the land ethic is a form of “environmental fascism” because it subordinates the welfare of humans to the good of the ecological whole. I argue that these objections are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of his theory by advocates and detractors alike. The land ethic is centrally a psychological theory of moral development and ecological rationality that advocates a shift in the way that environmental problems are conceptualized and approached.
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