I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university’s students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: ‘We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?’ But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
I am aware, of course, that hardly anyone who reads these lines will feel himself addressed by them—so deep has the conviction that we are all governed by anonymous forces beyond our control penetrated into the shared consciousness of our time. And accompanying this conviction is a debasement of the idea of civil courage.
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.'
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I’m not a computer scientist, but I do, in fact, feel myself addressed by Weizenbaum’s words. While the degree of agency we share over the shape of our world varies greatly, I remain convinced that we all have choices to make. But these choices are not without consequences or costs. And each one of us will find, from time to time, the need for courage, and it strikes me that such courage, call it civil courage or courage in the ordinary, is the antidote to what Arendt famously diagnosed as the banality of evil.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum quoted by L. M. Sacasas in Manufactured Inevitability and thr Need for Courage
