Andrew Culbreth

This paper questions three sets of claims that Davis advances in his reading of Plato’s Protagoras: (1) Socrates of the Protagoras attempts to remove the pain of uncertainty from courage, and Socrates dares to face the fearful while knowing it to be fearful; (2) Socrates’ hedonistic calculus proves to be impossible; (3) Socrates attempts to prevent Hippocrates from associating with Protagoras by showing that courage cannot be assimilated to wisdom. I offer reasons to question each of these sets of interpretive claims.

Aristotle characterizes the courageous person as someone who “will fear” frightening things in the right way, and someone who “will endure” terrifying things for the sake of the noble (NE III 7, 1115b11-13). Aristotle’s claims that the courageous person experiences fear have puzzled commentators for at least two reasons: first, Aristotle’s contention about the courageous person’s fear appears to be inconsistent with his claims, elsewhere in the ethical treatises, that the courageous person is fearless; second, if courageous agents suffer fear, and if fear involves a desire to avoid pain, then courageous people must act against some of their desires and thus appear to be self-controlled (enkratic) as opposed to fully virtuous. I argue that Aristotle has the resources to meet these challenges by appealing to his implicit distinction between courageous and non-courageous fear, and that only courageous fear makes contributions to Aristotelian courage. Fear, like most emotions for Aristotle, can be felt either well or poorly (NE II 5, 1105b27-1106a1). Courageous agents experience fear for their physical survival, insofar as they are human. However, they do not need to struggle to overcome this fear and their fear does not motivate them to flee from battle or fearful situations in which they can act virtuously. Instead, they can put the objects of their fear into proper perspective, taking appropriate precautions against physical harm, failure, or disgrace while nevertheless attempting to achieve a noble goal through courageous activity. Aristotle’s account not only highlights an important relationship between fear and virtue, but it also defends a crucial intuition that people are brave in part because they feel fear, rather than despite their fears.

This article seeks to describe in general terms what has become the standard way of conceptualizing moral injury in the clinical psychological and psychiatric literature, which is the key source for applications of the concept in other domains. What we call “the standard model” draws on certain assumptions about beliefs, mental states, and emotions as well as an implicit theory of causation about how various forms of harm arise from certain experiences or “events” that violate persons’ moral beliefs and systems. Our analysis makes these assumptions more explicit and subjects them to critical scrutiny. In so doing, we survey the current literature and identify basic features of how moral injuries are defined, how they are thought to occur, and the forms of treatment or repair that appear to be indicated. We caution that it matters how moral experience is characterized and argue that an alternative understanding of what is the moral in moral injury is important for overcoming critical challenges to the standard model. Moreover, recently evolving approaches to moral repair could be more consistent with an alternative model. Our concluding suggestion is that a more robust account of the nature of moral experience and its relations to self-identity and social experience more generally could advance understanding of the etiology of moral injury and promote rehabilitation.