Courage in the Military: Physical and Moral

Abstract The first section of this article argues that the best-known definition of physical courage, stemming from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is less than fit for today's military. Having done so, a short outline is given of more ‘scientific’ approaches to physical courage, drawing mainly on insights offered by psychologists, and of the problems that are inherent to these approaches. Subsequently, the article turns to a topic that is often paid lip service to in the military, yet remains somewhat hard to pin down: moral courage. Although both forms of courage are intertwined, they are so in a less straightforward manner than is often thought. The way the development of physical courage in today's military is undertaken, for instance, contributes little to the development of moral courage. Keywords: Cohesioncouragecowardicefearvirtue Notes 1. There are limits here, however: most of us would not wish to call the 9/11 terrorists courageous men. The moral difference between the terrorist and the German soldier is pretty straightforward, though: the former deliberately chose to serve an immoral cause, the latter often much less so. 2. However, although he thought him falling short of true courage, Aristotle did acknowledge that the citizen soldier, preferring death to disgrace, comes closer to being courageous than the professional soldier who attaches more value to his own safety than to his good name; the latter fight wells against weaker opponents, but is the first to flee when the danger becomes too great (2006: 1116b). 3. Here, too, are limits: we are less keen to see the Japanese sailor in World War II that cheerfully stepped into his Kaiten, a manned torpedo offering no chances of survival, as courageous (Miller Citation2000: 273–276). The R.A.F. crew still had a choice; the Japanese sailor probably did not, given the all-pervasiveness of the Japanese shame culture. In fact, most of us would think that the rare Japanese soldier who surrendered surpassed in courage his numerous colleagues who fought to the death. 4. Of course, if someone is better trained, equipped, and led, he has also less reason to fear. On that ground, Plato had Socrates for a moment maintaining that the better-trained person is less courageous (Plato Citation2006: 193). 5. Similar to the way a person without fear of bodily injury is not so much physically courageous as he is a psychopath, one could argue that the person who does not care about what others think of him is not morally courageous but shameless. 6. Testimony to the inverse relationship between social cohesion and moral courage is that, apparently, the more socially cohesive a unit, the more prone to a lack of moral courage it is. To cite two infamous examples: in 1993, Canadian Airbornes from 2 Commando, known for its strong in-group loyalty, tortured and murdered a Somali teenager that had tried to access the Canadian camp. Winslow (Citation1999) wrote about the role of group bonding in this incident. In that same year, and also in Somalia, Belgian paratroopers also went amiss. In both cases, there were attempts to conceal the events. The statement of a United States Navy corpsman, interviewed about his knowledge of Iraqi prisoners being mistreated by Marines in 2003, that ‘there was a lot of peer pressure to keep one's mouth shut,’ also bears witness to the role of cohesion in keeping silent (http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/navy3545.pdf). There have been more of these cover-ups in recent years, and both the misconduct as well the covering up following it might well be to a large extent consequences of stressing social cohesion. 7. See, for instance, Paul Robinson's article in this issue and Segal & Kestnbaum (Citation2002: 445–446). 8. Only five percent of the enlisted U.S. men in World War II named idealistic reasons (including patriotism) as incentives (Stouffer Citation1949: 108, 150). Interestingly, in another study from the same period, less famous and less often cited, 93% of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans that had fought in the Spanish Civil War were of the opinion that ‘having a clear idea of the things that were at stake in the war made them a much better soldier,’ 6% thought it made them a better soldier, and only 1% thought it had no effect (Dollard Citation1944: 42). This is an illustration of the fact that ‘there is no universal explanation why men fight,’ with the social sciences offering ‘an ever-changing mixture of social, moral, pragmatic and psychological theory. Rather than being universal truths about how men fight, these are themselves historical material in their own right’ (Wessely Citation2006: 286). 9. Research into the behavior of U.S. military personnel in Somalia suggested that non-homogeneous units, e.g., including women and personnel with ethnically diverse backgrounds, sometimes do a better job in this respect than do homogeneous groups (Miller & Moskos Citation1995: 634). 10. One could argue that this way out in turn overlooks that task cohesion, taken as sharing the same goals, could be of no more than limited use to the military because soldiers cannot be relied upon to be driven by the ideals that inspired their political leaders, and that therefore social cohesion remains necessary to motivate soldiers. However, even if it is true that soldiers are not motivated by the abstract goal of, for instance, bringing about freedom and democracy, this does not imply that they cannot be motivated by shared intermediate objectives on a more operational level. This leaves another complicating factor unresolved, however, namely that although performance might depend more on task than on social cohesion, performing courageous acts is a very specific form of performance (see also Kolditz Citation2006: 657). Possibly because of its particularity, the underlying motivation of physical courage is different to that of performance per se. Then again, as said, the Stouffer study did not find that cohesion was overly important in motivating soldiers to continue fighting.

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