ABSTRACT
“Brave one-year-old undergoes successful heart-transplant operation” ran a banner headline in my local newspaper some months ago. Such spurious and unrealistic ascriptions of courage as this may well cause us to raise an eyebrow. Attributing courage to an infant that had no idea of what was happening, and certainly did not choose to risk a dangerous operation, is an evidently absurd use of virtue language. But if we easily detect the well-meaning emotional manipulation that is being practised on us here, it is not always so simple to tell apart true cases of courage from counterfeits. It is not just that courage, like other virtues, can be falsely laid claim to, as it is, for example, by the traditional comic figure of the braggart soldier. The subtler difficulty lies in telling apart cases of genuine courage from others which resemble it – in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “flourish in the same hedgerow” – but are really instances of other conditions.
