Strength vs. weakness, courage vs. cowardice

I've blogged before about how recently the word "cowardly" tends to be overused and extended to mean "something I disapprove of" or "generic negative adjective". I've noticed this extension is happening more and more often with the words courageous and cowardly, and the words strong and weak, and all the adjectives thereof. These words are growing connotations of "moral and immoral" respectively, or "morally superior and morally inferior" respectively.

This is terribly inaccurate. Being courageous or cowardly, being brave or scared, being strong or weak, is morally neutral. This notion of giving moral value to degrees of strength or bravery probably, the fact that our culture tends to celebrate situations in which the moral or morally superior choice requires exceptional courage/bravery/strength, but the fact remains that it isn't the courage/bravery/strength that makes that particular choice moral or morally superior.

If, god forbid, there is a you-know-what, and I muster up every ounce of my courage (plus some that I don't have) and go charging into the room to dispose of it myself, that is courageous. If instead I run screaming from the room and make someone else dispose of it, that is cowardly. But the actions are morally equal - just like taking out the garbage myself vs. asking someone else to do it.

If, in the midst of a great personal crisis, I manage to go through my day-to-day life with a stiff upper lip and total sangfroid, not letting the crisis affect me at all, that is being strong. If, instead, I only just manage to fulfil my duties and spend every spare minute crying into my pillow, that is being weak. But there is no moral difference between these two situations, just a difference in emotional reaction.

I think this all arises from the fact that courage, strength and bravery are quite convenient, whereas cowardice and weakness are quite inconvenient. If I am the epitome of courage and strength at all times, that is useful for those around me. They can count on me to do anything, and know that I will always be low-maintenance. But if I am weak and frightened, that requires a lot of work and attention from others - and not simple problem-solving and throwing money at things, but slow, painstaking, handholding emotional support. Combine that with the fact that situations in which courage and moral superiority co-occur tend to be loudly celebrated, and we have this whole over-celebration of courage and strength and over-demonization of cowardice and weakness.

The fact of the matter is that courage, strength, cowardice and weakness cannot have moral value because they are not choices. They are states of being, or personality traits. They can no more have moral value than can our eye colour or our phobias or our like or dislike of bitter foods. I cannot make a conscious choice to be more courageous or less cowardly. I can, in some situations, make a conscious choice to take the course of action that happens to be more courageous, but, like everyone, I do possess a finite amount of courage, and I cannot just make a decision to use more courage than I possess.