Courage is generally defined as the ability to face danger without fear.
Fear can be debilitating and degrade your performance under pressure, and so courage is initially a positive quality that allows you to do better than you otherwise would in a given situation. However, fear exists to cause you to avoid dangerous situations, and so too much courage can cause you to not fear situations that you really should, because of the high likelihood of a negative outcome.
You can define courage so that it is only the positive half of this equation, but then you end up with situations where whether someone is stupid or courageous largely depends on the outcome of their actions. eg. Is Carl Boenish (the originator of the term BASE jumping) courageous because he leaped off things with a parachute and filmed the event, or stupid because he leaped off a cliff with a parachute and died.
I prefer to think of courage as a quality on a separate track to stupidity. You can act/be stupid because you lacked the brain power to comprehend your actions, or you can act/be stupid because you were too courageous to listen to your brain telling you not to do something. I don't really think cowardice is the opposite of stupidity with courage somewhere in the middle. :)
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Date: 2007-01-23 01:13 am (UTC)Fear can be debilitating and degrade your performance under pressure, and so courage is initially a positive quality that allows you to do better than you otherwise would in a given situation.
However, fear exists to cause you to avoid dangerous situations, and so too much courage can cause you to not fear situations that you really should, because of the high likelihood of a negative outcome.
You can define courage so that it is only the positive half of this equation, but then you end up with situations where whether someone is stupid or courageous largely depends on the outcome of their actions. eg. Is Carl Boenish (the originator of the term BASE jumping) courageous because he leaped off things with a parachute and filmed the event, or stupid because he leaped off a cliff with a parachute and died.
I prefer to think of courage as a quality on a separate track to stupidity.
You can act/be stupid because you lacked the brain power to comprehend your actions, or you can act/be stupid because you were too courageous to listen to your brain telling you not to do something. I don't really think cowardice is the opposite of stupidity with courage somewhere in the middle. :)