I should have been braver - by Ruxandra Teslo
A couple of months ago I wrote a piece arguing that intellectual courage is the scarcest source. It was motivated not merely by the fact that I notice intellectual cowardice in other people and that bothers me but, perhaps more crucially, because I see it in myself more often than I would like. Since I consider myself “an intellectual”, broadly speaking, this is not great. I am not doing anything practical like landing planes or doing cardiac bypass surgeries, so the least I can do to be more than someone that indulges in nice intellectual pursuits and not be a leech on society is defend truth. And there’s an important recent instance where I did not do enough of it, despite being well placed to do so. That is the case of Lucy Letby, a former neonatal nurse in the UK, who was convicted in 2023 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
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