Apropos the conduct of Francesco Schettino in leaving his ship before its passengers had been got safely to land, Giles Fraser has some pertinent reflections on moral courage. He starts by asking, 'how do we know what sort of person we would turn out to be in such circumstances?' Though few of us do know, Fraser argues that there are ways we can improve our chances of acting as we should:
[T]he idea that courage requires discipline and training needs a fairer hearing. For at least since Aristotle there has been an important strain of moral thought that has recognised human virtue not as some innate given, but rather as something that one can prepare for, and indeed get better at. The reason the soldier strips and re-strips his weapon a thousand tedious times on the parade ground is so that he can do it, without thought, when he hasn't slept for days and the bullets are pinging about his ears. Over time, it becomes a matter of instinct. And the advice of the modern army is that the same is true of courage. If you rehearse "doing the right thing" enough, you are much more likely to do the right thing when terrified or confused.
Fraser goes on to say that this advice isn't specific to combat training but can be generalized to the rest of life, and concludes:
[I]t's not the fear of our inner Captain S[c]hettino that matters most. He lurks within us all. The real question is how we shape our behaviour.
The context is such that we know Fraser is talking about shaping by practising - practising in various ways to be the sort of person you hope you would be when it matters. But there is one form of 'mental' practice that people go through even when they don't have occasions to practice the behaviour that would be relevant when it comes to a crunch of some sort. This mental practice is sometimes known as morality: having a sense of what your obligations are, what you owe to others, whether because of who they are or who you are or how you're related to them, or just because they are also human beings or sentient beings; having a sense of how it is right to behave in these circumstances or in those. Such notions constitute a kind of preparation, even if they're not practice in the meaning Fraser has most directly in mind.
This is one reason why I have argued more than once here that we should resist a claim common in writing about severe wrongdoing, including the commission of evil: namely, that we would all do the same thing given the circumstances. That claim is empirically false; but it is also the wrong kind of 'practice' if I may put it thus. Better preparation is to know what you ought to do and ought not to; this will improve your chances of not succumbing to an 'inner Captain Schettino' or inner somebody-even-worse.
The discussion is also relevant to the common habit of softening condemnation of those who perpetrate terrible wrongs, softening it merely on the grounds that there were psychological causes of one kind or another operating on them. This is nearly always used selectively: for example, to lighten the burden of responsibility for wrongdoing of people perceived as politically closer to oneself, when the same would not be done for others who are politically more distant.
