Pears(1980), “Courage as a Mean”, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics

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(본래 절 구분이 없는 글)

 

(1. Introduction : Questions)

(2. How does courage involve fear and confidence?)

(3. Medial Fear and Medial Confidence)

(4. Conclusion : Remaining Questions)

 

1. Introduction

 

*Questions

 

1-1) If courage finds a place on the scale of fear and actions exhibiting fear, how can it also find a place on the scale of confidence and actions exhibiting confidence?

1-2) Or is there only one scale here, continuous in fact and discontinuous only in the name?

 

2-1) Courage seems to be a matter of feeling and controlling fear. How then can it be a virtue?

2-2) Or is the man of true Aristotelian courage literally fearless?

 

3-1) How are these two goals related to one another?

3-2) Must there always be an external goal, such as victory, or could a man cultivate courage purely for its nobility, like Hemingway, or, to take a passive case, like a prisoner waiting helplessly in a cell for his own execution?

3-3) When there is an external goal, why must it be victory?

3-4) Does the external goal even have to be good in order that courage may be exhibited?

 

⇒ 1-1) ~ 3-4) are all equally interesting when they are rephrased as questions about the structure of our concept of courage

 

*Main Question : concept of courage

- unrealistic to expect a simple acount of a virtue as complex as courage

- unrealistic to expect all its instances to conform to a single pattern

⇒ Aristotle must have felt these difficulties when he tried to fit courage into the theory of mean

 

2. How does courage involve fear and confidence?

 

*1st Question

: “How does Aristotelian courage involve two distinct feelings, if indeed fear and confidence are two distinct feelings?”

⇒ look first at a virtue that does not face that predicament bec. 1) the contrasting case of courage will show up in striking detail, 2) lay the foundation for a theory about the relation between courage and self-control

 

*Moderation – a clear case

- homogeneity of scale : bodily pleasure (objects - food, drink, and sex)

- mismatch of feeling and action : feeling 3(excess, mediality, deficiency) * action 3 = 9 (the most interesting is self control)

- moderation : do nothing contrary to reason for the sake of bodily pleasure, not have excessive or bad appetites, not feel pleasure contrary to reason

- self-control : do nothing contrary to reason for the sake of bodily pleasure, having strong and bad appetites, feel pleasure contrary to reason but not led by it

⇒ “Self-control is not a virtue but a kind of mixed state”(NE 4.9.8)

 

*2nd Question

: “If it is a matter of feeling and controlling fear, how can it be a virtue? Or is the man of true Aristotelian courage literally fearless?”

⇒ If so(literally fearless), the virtue must be rare, and it may be unintelligible

⇒ can’t be answered before the question how the virtue involves fear and confidence (1st question)

 

*The simplest answer for 1st question (simple answer 1)

: fear and confidence lie on a single homogeneous scale because fear shades into confidence as it diminishes and vice versa

- moderation – desires for the same kinds of things / courage – fear is not itself a desire

⇒ but does it always involves a desire?

 

*the desire involved in fear

: must be the desire to save one’s own skin

→ countergoals of courage : death and wounds

⇒ 3 kinds of goals : victory(external goal), nobility of courageous action(internal goal), wounds and death(countergoal, negative side)

 

*incompleteness of definition of fear

: “expectation of harm”(NE 3.6.2)

← omits all reference to avoidance, simply the opposite of hope, no connection with taking avoiding action (문제 있어 보임, 저 정의가 이러한 불완전성을 함축하는가?)

→ plausible definition : “desire to avoid harm that is judged probable”

← fear is impossible unless there is some hope of safety, because fear makes one deliberate, and nobody deliberates in a situation already accepted as hopeless (Rh. 1383a) (불완전하다고 평가한 정의가 이러한 함축을 이미 가지고 있는 것으로 보임, “expectation”!)

 

*possibility of the simplest answer for 1st question

: possible if confidence involved a desire for harm

↔ confidence is “an expectation that what brings safety will be close at hand, while what produces fear will not exist or will be far away” (Rh. 1383a17-19)

⇒ then confidence involves a desire for risk?

↔ unless the desire involved in fear is desire to avoid risk, but the desire to avoid harm does not imply desire to avoid risk

↔ even if it involves a desire for risk, 1) external goal x → 2) avoid harm but expose to risk pointlessly → absurd

 

*the alternative answer for 1st question

: there are two different scales, one for fear and the other for confidence

 

*Ross’s suggestion (alternative answer 1)

: each of the two feelings involves a basic desire and that the two scales exhibit the varying degrees of the two different basic desires

 

1) scale of fear : courage which is control of fear, and the vice is cowardice

2) scale of confidence : discretion which is control of the desire for risk, and the vice is rashness

 

↔ 1), 2) exhibit varying degrees of desire for the same kind of object: risk or danger, so they collapse into a single scale. “So, though Ross produces the illusion of two dyadic systems and two virtues, in fact he is offering a single triadic system and a single virtue.”

↔ + object of the aversion is not risk but harm, confidence does not involve any basic desire differentiated by its proper object

 

⇒ must go back to fear and interpret Aristotle’s doctrine that people ought to fear things medially → return to the interpretation of Aristotelian confidence

 

3. Medial Fear and Medial Confidence

 

*distinction between two uses of fearless

 

1) behave fearlessly because he lacks the appropriate fear

2) although he has it, behaves like a man who lacks it

 

⇒ average human nature determines what things are in general fearful → as a man he finds them fearful, but as a man of courage he finds them either slightly fearful or in no way fearful

⇒ man of courage goes into the dangerous predicament with the appropriate human fear of countergoal but his fear already conforms to standard

 

A) contributory fear : fear of the countergoal, it will contribute to the action

B) behavioral fear : fear in the manner of the agent’s conduct

 

⇒ A) need not produce B)

+ there are general standard of A), people may feel incorrect fears (179)

+ not B) is more than not acting fearful, it means that he will not be troubled by emotional perturbation

 

*Can a man alter his fears?

 

1) Aristotle clearly believes that a man can alter them over a long period of time

2) there is not much evidence for taking him to believe that he could alter them immediately

 

⇒ for 2), fear is amenable to reason because it is based on an assessment of the disvalue of its object + in a particular predicament a man may change his estimate of the probability of the countergoal

⇒ reason can make good the deficiency or remove the excess in the fear, or can oppose the excess or deficiency in the fear

 

⇐ if the external goal has a comparatively low value, the agent’s decision may go the other way → medial desire to aviod the countergoal does not have to be controlled

⇐ even when it is outweighed, it may still rightly modify the way in which the agent tries to attain the external goal

 

*simple answer 2 for 1st question

: confidence involves a basic lack of aversion from harm → same scale as fear

↔ not fit the text – Aristotle distinguished between excessive confidence and excess fearlessness

 

*The only remaining answer for 1st question (alternative answer 2)

: confidence is assessment of the odds(chances of safety)

- desperate courage of the Spartans when certain to be killed → if they were confident, it was only in the behavioral sense of “being confident,” parallel to the behavioral sense of “being fearless” → “to face confidently”

- medial confidence assess the chances of safety correctly → if he decides to go for the external goal, he will do so with a correct and steadfast assessment of the chances of safety and a conviction

 

*graduated scale on which both fear and confidence are placed

1) fears of the agent’s general fears of types of countergoal

2) the modification of the agent’s general fear by his assessment of the probability of the countergoal in the particular predicament

→ in the 2) scale, fear and confidence are related to the same factor of probability but in opposite ways

 

4. Conclusion : Remaining Questions

 

*external goals of courage restricted

a) to be closely related to safety and survival

b) takes the paradigm to be safety and survival of a city at war

 

*passive cases of courage?

- didn’t use it in this way, perhaps because courage seemed to him to be too closely tied to action

 

*internal goal and external goal?

- related, the commander has to ask himself whether it really is what courage requires → reflections on possible nobility will seldom put him in a position to answer this question for in such cases nobility is a resultant property and not a constitutive property, have to go more deeply into the structure of the particular project

- external goal could not conflict with the internal goal in the way in which it conflicts with the countergoal, the conflict of motive, if there is one, is of a different kind → what kind? the answer depends on Aristotle’s theory about the better kind of egoism (NE 9.8)

 

*Does courage require a good external goal?

- If the attribution of courage depends partly on the correctness of the agent’s valuation of the countergoal, why shold it not depend equally on the correctness of the agent’s valuation of the external goal?

- dilemma: either courage requires only that the agent actually have certain feelings about both the countergoal and the external goal, or it requires that he have correct feelings... → may have accepted this dilemma, but not clear whether he did accept it, because he confines his discussion of courage to cases where the external goal is unquestionably good