text: can somebody define courage? is it resistance to fear, mastery of fear or  absence of fear. courage is the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation. as a virtue, courage is covered extensively in aristotle's nicomachean ethics, its vice of deficiency being cowardice, and its vice of excess being recklessness.  the precise view of what constitutes courage not only varies among cultures, but among individuals. for instance, some define courage as lacking fear in a situation that would normally generate it. others, in contrast, hold that courage requires one to have fear and then overcome it.  there are also more subtle distinctions in the definition of courage. for example, some distinguish between courage and foolhardiness in that a courageous person overcomes a justifiable fear for an even more noble purpose. if the fear is not justifiable or the purpose not noble, then the courage is either false, or foolhardy.