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Reader question: Please explain “moral victory” in this sentence: In today’s sports, you have to win and no “moral victories” count as wins. My comments: Moral victory refers to a good (subjective) lesson or experience gained from an apparent defeat. This term, most frequently seen in sports, belong to the optimistic losers, who choose to see the good from, say, a narrow defeat in order to remain upbeat instead of downtrodden from now on and hence forth. You may understand “moral” in “moral victory” as you understand “moral” in “the moral of this story is such and such”. In the ancient Aesop’s Fable, for example, a fox keeps leaping for the grapes up in the vines and can’t reach them. Finally giving up, the fox says to himself: “I might as well look for something else to eat because those grapes are green and sour”. The moral of this story? Don’t be sour grapes. In a more recent example, Ah Q, the hapless and pitiable (or un-pitiable, up to you) character in Lu Xun’s book, takes the Chinese propensity for claiming moral victories to the extreme. In the story, the homeless, jobless but once-upon-a-time noble Ah Q finds himself on the losing end of a fist fight with one of his fellow idlers. As he flees the ugly scene, he mutters to himself: “A son is beating his Papa for I’ve always considered him my son, or even inferior. But at any rate, what has this world come to, when sons are allowed to lay their hands on their Papas!” | 
