Indeed. It seems to me that courage means acting in spite of fear. Without fear, can courage be said to exist?

Of course, like any virtue, courage is an ideal, meaning something a person can work toward but never perfectly achieve.

I could value courage as a favorite (or even my very favorite) virtue and still sometimes or often fail to exhibit courage in daily choices.

In the prompt, I named charity as one of my favorite virtues, choosing from a list of Classical virtues. But I am not always charitable. I try to be! But sometimes I'm thoughtless, or unobservant, or maybe just grumpy, and so I don't notice an opportunity to give something tangible or intangible to a person in need.

But because I highly value charity as a virtue, I try and sometimes I succeed.

That's sort of what I was getting at in my probably inartfully phrased prompt. What sort of virtues, meaning what sort of behavior ideals, do people value for leading ethical lives?

I'm most familiar with Classical (Western) ideas about virtue, but Confucius taught similar concepts. The concept of discrete virtues as ideals is far from unique to Western philosophy.

Nor is philosophy (by far!) the only system of thought dealing with virtues. Many religions center virtue ethics. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount can be viewed as a proposal of virtues or a framework for virtue ethics. Progressive Christianity is all about that these days as they speak of orthopraxy (right practice) rather than orthodoxy (right thinking).

Classical philosophers got there long before Jesus did, and Jewish rabbis had already been thinking hard about virtues for centuries before Jesus was born, so clearly, there's no one way to define virtues. There's no one list of virtues to choose from. (Even if virtue ethics were the only way to construct moral frameworks, which is far from true.)

But in general, most of us can probably recognize the concept of virtues, whatever system of thought we're centering, and many of us probably try to evaluate our behavior through a lens of virtue ethics, even if we don't use those words or maybe even if we don't recognize we're doing it.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble! It's early in the morning and I'm sitting out on my porch in the cool breeze with a coffee, and I got carried away.

Thanks for your story!