Moral+Courage




 * Book citation information **
 * Reviewed by ** : Kelly Trujillo
 * Book Author: ** Rushworth M. Kidder
 * Book Title: ** Moral Courage
 * Publisher and Year Published: ** HarperCollins (2005)
 * ISBN Number: ** 0-06-059154-4

In __Moral Courage__, author Rushworth M. Kidder addresses the increasingly important concept of “moral courage” by explaining that while in the past physical courage was more necessary, we are now living in a society and culture where moral courage is needed at the base of effective leadership. In his book, Kidder seeks to help leaders ask themselves and answer the questions: “Is the benefit worth the risk? Am I motivated by my desire to uphold my beliefs or to impose them on others? Will my actions create collateral damage among those with no stake in the outcome?” By addressing these concerns and walking the reader through comprehensive strategies to effectively deal with relevant leadership concerns, Kidder’s seeks to create a leader who is morally courageous and consciously minded. This book had several key discussions relevant to leadership concerns including whistleblowing, how to navigate right verses right situations, how to asses the risks of situations, understanding your values, standing up for principle, and understanding moral courage. Not only does the book discuss these concepts in depth, it also offers real accounts of multiple situations involving the concepts and illustrates how leaders have navigated those spaces. Additionally, at the end of almost every chapter, the book has “moral courage assessments” that focus on the one main concept discussed in that chapter and offers tools for leaders to use to assess a situation they find themselves in relating to that issue (ex: risk assessment, enduring the hardship, avoiding the inhibitors, etc.). Due to these assessments and the very relevant material, this book is engaging for leaders and is a read I would recommend. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone entering any sort of leadership position. Each of the chapters covered very different but intersecting elements of leadership and how these roles interconnect. I especially liked that, after covering a topic one might encounter at some point as a leader, many chapters had “moral courage checklists” in which the challenge/situation was addressed and advice for how to navigate these situations was given. Additionally, the chapters lined with personal and sometimes even emotional stories that helped to exemplify the points being made in the respective chapter. This was incredibly helpful because it offered a much-needed praxis between practice and methods discussed in the chapters and actual, real-life situations and how these methods were applied. Overall, I enjoyed this book, found it very helpful and relevant, and would recommend it.
 * Book summary contents **
 * Key Terms & Definitions: **
 * Moral: of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical
 * Courage: the quality of mind which enables one to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness, or without fear, or fainting of heart; or, knowing something is going to be dangerous but knowing you must do it anyways for the greater good of a given situation
 * Physical courage: Physical acts such as a mother saving a drowning child, may be principle-related without necessarily being principle-driven
 * Moral courage: driven by principle; when something is done to demonstrate physical strength or save lives but is also done to support virtues and sustain core principles; values include honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion
 * Principle: guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct; a personal or specific basis of conduct or management
 * Whistle-blowing: four components including an individual acting to make information public, information is leaked to parties outside the organization who then make the information public, the information pertains to an actual/probable/nontrivial wrongdoing in the organization, and the person leaking the information for exposure is or was a part of the organization
 * Groupthink: an effect that causes a team to make decisions no one of its individuals would have countenanced, the redefining of deviancy as normalcy leaving no perceived moral wrong that must be courageously righted
 * Altruism: an element that causes moral courage to be needed in an unforeseen way; needing courage to set the expression of goodness right
 * Deviancy: tendency to redefine deviant behavior as acceptable
 * Executive Summary of the Author's Main Premise: **
 * Relevance to Leadership Concerns: **
 * Key Points from Each Chapter: **
 * Chapter One: Standing Up for Principle **
 * Moral courage doesn’t always produce an immediate benefit
 * // Having // values is different than //living by// values
 * There are three intersecting elements of moral courage: danger, principles, and endurance
 * Morally courageous leaders tend to have the following traits in common: greater confidence in principles as opposed to personality, high tolerance for personal loss, exposure, and ambiguity, acceptance of deferred gratification and simple rewards, independence of thought, and formidable persistence and determination (Kidder 18)
 * Chapter Two: Courage, Moral and Physical **
 * Courage is different from other virtues, partly because of social and cultural context
 * According to William Ian Miller, moral courage is defined as “the capacity to overcome to fear of shame and humiliation in order to admits one’s mistakes, to confess a wrong, to reject evil conformity, to denounce injustice, and also to define immoral or imprudent orders “ (Kidder 32)
 * This may be hard to do but will become easier to more we as a society do it and cultivate it into a habit
 * Leadership can commit great atrocities when leaders and subordinates lack moral courage as we have seen when considering many historical events
 * Taxonomy of moral courage forming under three headings of motives (firmness, duty, desire to reject evil conformity), inhibitions, and risks
 * The end of this chapter also offers a very helpful moral courage checklist which gives you five questions to consider when analyzing your situation and whether or not courage is required
 * Chapter Three: The Courage to Be Moral **
 * After interviewing people considered to have high ethics, the common values they shared were love, truthfulness, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility, and respect for life
 * Moral relativism comes into play here, and states that moral courage and values are aspirational as well as normative
 * As stated earlier, moral courage is different than other values. The author suggest that perhaps if we consider values as a necklace, then other values are the pearls on the necklace whereas courage is the string that holds the pearls together
 * This chapter ends with another very helpful moral courage checklist which scans for values and begs the question: Are the values that characterize my situation primarily economic, social, political, artistic, educational, scientific, or drawn from various other realms? Or are they genuinely moral due to fundamental distinctions between right and wrong? (Kidder 74-75)
 * Chapter Four: The First Circle: Applying the Values **
 * The courage to of whistle blowing which can be a very risky activity
 * Move from awareness to action through focusing, dismantling, and recognizing in a certain situation
 * Frameworks for decision-making: right vs. wrong (core value comes into conflict with something) and right vs. right (two core values come into conflict with one another)
 * Analyzing dilemmas through four paradigms of truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short term vs. long term, and justice vs. mercy
 * Three most commonly used resolution principles: ends-based (doing the greatest good for the greatest amount of people), rule-based (more deontological and duty based; takes no account of consequences and instead asks the person to make a choice they would like to see become the universal standard), and care-based (asking “what would others want us to do?” based on principles of reciprocity or reversibility and calls one to ask themselves if they would be comfortable with the decision if they were in someone else’s shoes and were the one being impacted by the decision)
 * Ends with a third very helpful moral courage checklist assessing how many values are factoring into decision making in your situation; accesses and breakdowns the idea of acting on conscience
 * Chapter Five: The Second Circle: Recognizing the Risks **
 * Discusses the elements of moral risk: ambiguity, exposure and loss
 * Ambiguity: perplexity, obscurity and lack of clarity; when something is an act of integrity verses and act of moral courage (something that is not risky does not require courage, rather, integrity)
 * Exposure: runs the risk of being morally and/or mentally vulnerable; morally courageous leaders must except that at times they will be exposed and they must be equipped to deal with this; even though prominence seems to be something people want in this egotistical day in age, it comes with the risk of having your flaws pointed out on a bigger stage and not everyone is morally courageous enough to deal with this reality
 * Loss: fear of losing something desirable such as job; moral courage is always an option but the stakes can be higher than just simply personal
 * Ends with another moral courage checklist which helps you assess the risks of a given situation with helpful questions dealing with the aforementioned elements of moral risk
 * Chapter Six: The Third Circle: Enduring the Hardship **
 * The anatomy of trust which includes truthfulness (an individual expresses sense of confidence in others) and trustworthiness (individual acts in a way which allows others to trust them)
 * When it comes to moral courage, four attributes contribute to our willingness to trust: experience, character, faith, and intuition
 * Ends with a fifth moral courage checklist which helps in assessing when you have the confidence to endure the hardship that moral courage requires
 * Chapter Seven: Fakes, Frauds, and Foibles: What Moral Courage Isn’t **
 * The paradox of moral courage: successful organizations must require moral courage of their leaders and then work hard to make sure their organizations are never in a position to need the moral courage of their leaders
 * Challenges of moral courage: moral courage often resides on both sides of an issue and therefore makes the right decision hard to come by; a rotting culture makes moral courage more difficult to attain
 * Challenges of moral courage also include timidity, foolhardiness, and physical courage
 * Groupthink, altruism and deviancy are also challenges moral courage faces
 * The chapter ends with another moral courage checklist which lists and defines potential inhibitors to leadership
 * Chapter Eight: Learning Moral Courage **
 * Moral courage can be taught and learned
 * Tests to assess whether the act of moral courage is genuine and what the reasons are for engaging in these acts: risk-benefit test, self-righteousness test, and innocent-parties test
 * Provides a moral courage checklist of how to learn moral courage through discourse and discussion, modeling and mentoring, and practice and persistence
 * Chapter Nine: Practicing Moral Courage in the Public Square **
 * Moral courage is something usually considered on a personal, individual level but is often times seen and needed in more public spheres and can be seen often in journalism (ex: segregated public schools, bureaucratic delays, international drug trafficking, human rights in war time, and unconscious racism
 * A wrongdoing can make an enormous affect in the public sphere, but an act of moral courage can make just as big of a difference. It only takes one person
 * Is the Book Worth the Read? Why or Why Not? **