Can You Have Too Much Courage?
Rethinking Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean
There is a word for excessive courage: rashness. Or foolhardiness. Or recklessness. The existence of these words seems to settle the matter — of course you can have too much courage, just as you can have too much of anything. But what if this common-sense view rests on a fundamental confusion about what courage actually is?
The Aristotelian Framework
Aristotle gave us one of philosophy’s most enduring models of virtue: the doctrine of the mean. Every virtue, he argued, occupies a middle position between two vices — one of deficiency, one of excess. Courage sits neatly between cowardice and rashness. The coward flees when they should stand firm. The rash person charges forward when they should retreat. The courageous person gets it right.
This framework has intuitive appeal. We all know people who seem to have “too much” of a good quality — confidence that curdles into arrogance, generosity that becomes self-destructive, honesty that turns cruel. The mean gives us language for these failures. It suggests that virtue is fundamentally about calibration, about finding the right dose of each quality for each situation.
A Challenge to the Mean
But consider an alternative view, one with roots in Socrates and the Stoics: what if true courage cannot be excessive, because courage properly understood already includes the wisdom to know when and how to act?
On this account, the reckless person charging into a burning building to retrieve a hat is not displaying too much courage. They are displaying no courage at all — or at best, a corrupted fragment of it. Courage is not merely willingness to face danger. It is willingness to face danger for worthy ends, with sound judgment about means. The moment that judgment fails, we are no longer talking about courage. We are talking about something else entirely.
This reframing has significant implications. Rashness is not courage-plus-something. It is courage-minus-something — namely, the discernment that makes courage a virtue in the first place. You cannot overdose on true courage because the moment wisdom fails, the substance changes. It is like asking whether you can have too much health. Whatever state harms you, by definition, is not health.
Two Models of Virtue
The disagreement between these positions is subtle but structural. Both views might praise the same actions and criticize the same failures. A soldier who takes a calculated risk to save a comrade: courageous. A soldier who takes a foolish risk for no good reason: not courageous. On this, Aristotle and his critics would likely agree.
But they disagree on the underlying metaphysics — on what kind of thing courage is.
For Aristotle, courage is essentially a quantity on a spectrum. Picture a dial that can be turned up or down. At one end lies cowardice. At the other, rashness. Virtue means setting the dial correctly. The rash person has real courage; they simply have too much of it.
For the alternative view, courage is essentially a quality that either exists in full or does not exist at all. Rashness is not an excess of courage but a different vice entirely — perhaps a combination of poor judgment and misplaced confidence. The reckless person is not “too courageous.” They have not yet achieved courage at all.
Why This Matters
This is not merely an academic distinction. It changes how we would teach someone to become courageous.
Under Aristotle’s model, we might tell the rash person: “You have the raw material. You have spirit and willingness to act. Now learn to dial it back. Moderate your impulses. Find the mean.” The advice is essentially subtractive — they need less of something they already have.
Under the alternative model, we would say something different: “You are not actually there yet. What you have is not courage but something that resembles it superficially. You need to develop discernment, not suppress spirit. You need to add wisdom, not subtract boldness.” The advice is additive — they need more of something they lack.
The same split applies to how we understand moral failure. Did the person who acted recklessly succumb to an excess of virtue? Or did they reveal that they never possessed the virtue in the first place? The answer shapes whether we see them as someone who lost control of a good quality or someone who was missing a crucial ingredient all along.
The Unity of Virtue
The alternative view connects to a broader thesis sometimes called the “unity of virtue.” On this account, the virtues are not separate qualities that can be possessed independently. You cannot truly have courage without wisdom, or justice without temperance. The virtues form an interlocking whole. To have one fully is to have them all; to lack one is to lack something essential in all the others.
This explains why “excessive courage” is incoherent. If courage requires wisdom, then an action taken without wisdom cannot be courageous, no matter how bold it appears. The rash person is not courageously foolish. They are simply foolish — and their apparent boldness is not courage but something else masquerading as it.
Conclusion
The existence of words like “rashness” and “foolhardiness” might seem to prove that courage can be excessive. But words can mislead. Perhaps these terms do not name an excess of courage but rather name entirely different failures — failures of judgment, of perception, of wisdom.
If true courage already contains within it the discernment to know when and how to act, then courage cannot be excessive by definition. What we call “too much courage” is simply not courage at all. And this means something profound: unlike most things in life, genuine virtue might be one of the rare goods of which you truly cannot have too much.
The courageous person, on this view, is not someone who has found the right dose of a dangerous quality. They are someone who has achieved something whole, something that includes both the will to act and the wisdom to act rightly. And that combination, by its nature, does not admit of excess.