When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in an Age of Confusion and Despair

• In Event: Subversive Habits: Resistance and Democratic Challenges

Abstract

What is moral courage, and why is it important? This paper explores moral courage in difficult political times through interviews with 50 individuals who have demonstrated moral courage. It offers a conceptual definition of moral courage and argues that moral courage cannot be understood without reference to political psychology, in particular perceptions, identity, agency, and how these relate to and define moral actions, broadly defined.
Located at the intersection of political and moral psychology, the paper asks: Why should we care about moral courage? Difficult times are not rare in political life. Wars, genocide, totalitarian abuse, political cruelty, all these force us to ask: What does a sensitive, humane person do when the world around them goes slightly mad? How do we explain why certain individuals find the moral courage to speak out, when so many retreat into the islands of their own world, or become cynical and bitter? What kind of person resists falling into the refuge of clan or tribe? Who refuses to succumb to anger, to fear of people who don’t look like us, of people who do not worship as we do? Who stands up to hate, in others and in ourselves? Who finds the strength to fight back against dogma, including our own? Who finds the restraint and sensitivity to listen, to find common ground, to avoid the cheap retort or annoyance and hostility?
Our analysis suggests (1) that courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is taking action even when we are afraid. It involves digging deep into ourselves and finding the strength to do the hard things even when we are uncertain, scared, anxious, tired, when we feel unequal to the task but we do it anyway. (2) The philosophers are wrong; moral courage need not involve moral reasoning. Instead, an Aristotelian analysis – finding examples of moral courage and then asking what these examples have in common – suggests moral courage derives from our sense of who we are. A story of moral courage thus is ultimately a story about ourselves, about identity, values, and agency, about our capacity to feel we can make a difference. (3) Moral courage becomes a habit. Just one seemingly inconsequential act of moral courage can increase the sense of what a single individual can accomplish. People often develop moral muscle in small, seemingly inconsequential ways.
In a time of cynicism – and the age of Trump is far from the worst we have encountered, or probably will experience – we need to understand why some people believe they possess the ability to change things. Beyond this, we need to be asking different questions than those traditionally found in the literature on moral courage. Why do some people act even when it is unpopular? Even when it is costly to them? Even when there is no reward, or their good deed goes unnoticed? Conscience and standards of morality and ethics can be stronger than our fear of scorn, our anxiety about failure, our dread of public censure or reprisals. When does this happen, and why?
Although we interviewed over 50 individuals, this project focuses closely on the journeys of 13 people who did this. Some were public figures, like Steve Zimmer, who protected undocumented students as head of the LA Unified School District, or Loretta Lynch, who withstood pressure from the governor to “go along” during the Enron crisis. Others were private citizens, like Erwin Chemerinsky, who sued Trump for violation of the emoluments clause, or Steve Ceballos, who took his fight against corruption within the District Attorney’s office to the Supreme Court. Others demonstrate moral courage in the home, as did Choo Tee Lim, sold into slavery in China as a child, who resisted poverty and cultural pressure to give up her own children, or Kay, who gave up 13 years of her life to care for her aging parent. Other subjects withstood bullying and bigotry against Muslims, or caste discrimination in India. We even include a few academics, such as Janusz Reykowski, who risked his reputation to create the Roundtable talks that pulled Polish democracy back from the edge of civil war or Soviet occupation because he “did not want to see one more child killed.”
After a brief introduction explaining how we did the research, we construct a narrative interpretive analysis of stories of 13 individuals to suggest what listening to these stories teaches us about what constitutes moral courage, and why psychological portraits of moral courage are critical in understanding how the mind actually works when confronting moral choices.

Author

• Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine