Being cowardly is showning fear
No one person is going to get this right, because it's not possible.
One could consider suicide the cowards way of not dealing with the consequences of their actions.
One could consider being cautious as cowardly.
It should be obvious that not taking on unnecessary risk is intelligent, not cowardly per se.
It should also be obvious that facing death when there are alternatives is also not cowardly.
There are no countries, coorporations, or gods.
There is only human behavior and it's consequences.
These other ideas are merely proxies for people with roughly similiar envelopes of behavior.
Using emotionally based concepts are meant solely to deal with persuading humans and affecting behavior.
It has little to do with the science of dealing with and limiting behavioral constructs that are dangerous.
Spoken as a true leftist.