I just tagged a piece in the “Nascent Flames” vampire series here on Ficly with “Moral Cowardice” and realized it’s the only piece on the site with that tag, and that a lot of people use the term in a lot of different ways. A simple google search brings up a variety of ways of looking at the term, from

(1) Ayn Rand’s Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers, to
(2) Pak Tea Party’s More bluntly, it is moral cowardice exhibited by pathetic men and women who offer concessions at the expense of others, to
(3) Marshall’s A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility.

In The Spellsong Cycle, L. E. Modesitt describes moral cowards as those too afraid to act before something bad happens, instead of after it.

Write a ficly wherein the narrator displays or observes an instance of moral cowardice and include “moral cowardice” as a tag.