As Philippa Foot writes in one of her essays, hope is one of the virtues, and it is something important as it helps stick through hard times and great challenges. I like this thought. A hopeful person is probably less prone to be negative, and thus less likely to give up to early, to not to support her community in the face of difficult times.
Another advantage of hopefulness might be that such a person might offer support to others. A hopeful person may be less prone to go 'all apeshit', as they say, and overreact when getting bad news. This way he doesn't strengthen the feeling of the person who trust's him with her problem that the problem is very bad. A hopeful person might provide calm advice, some supportive words, and maybe also a few practical ideas or good questions that point the way to a solution.
So, is hope all rosy? Not exactly. There are two things that matter. Hope can be exercised too much or about the wrong subject, and also for the wrong reasons. If one is hopeful in situations when there is an obvious danger that needs to be averted, one can do serious damage by remaining inactive. That is a problem people often point out with Christians who rely on divine intervention instead of, for example, medical treatment. Such cases draw criticisms that the agent rejecting medical treatment is irrational, since they are too hopeful. Even if there is a helpful, intervening God (I entertain this only as a theoretical possibility) it is not sure that 1) it would help in such cases, 2) in this particular case, 3) it would not help by offering the chance to get medical help, etc.
George Frederic Watts: Hope (second version, 1886)
A case where hope could be warranted, but one can still be irrational for being hopeful, is the case of a father who has an alcoholic daughter. The father hopes that his daughter will recover. Good thing, and hope can be a useful motivating factor that fuels his continuous support even after the roughest atrocities. But if he is hopeful for the wrong reason, his hope won't help him act in the right way. For example he might be hopeful because he has read many self-help books. These suggest things like 'everyone goes through difficult times, and that's a lesson we all need to get', or 'people need to fight their demons alone, and they will emerge stronger', or even just reading proper work without adequate training, and misunderstanding it. E.g.: the dad 'diagnosis his daughter with bipolar disorder. In fact, that's not the problem at all. The man does not seek adequate help, or tries to support his daughter with the wrong methods. In such cases the hope that would be beneficial if had for the right reasons can turn against those who should gain by it.
Some cases of placing too much weight on hope are instances of self-delusion. No matter that people didn't interact successfully with others earlier by following a certain set of principles, they still carry on. They base their hope that things will work out for them on some mistaken view. They might think that it was just that they did not get the right people as partners in business, or did not marry the right man. They might even think that they should actually take a firmer stance, since things didn't work out as they wanted them to work out. 'Now, it's time I do things my own way.' Whereby this led to some of the problems earlier as well.
It seems then that for hope to be a virtue one needs to have some constraints on it. If one is hopeful one should always assess what warrants the hope. If one finds the reasons convincing then hope needs no questioning. Also, being self-delusional about one topic does not mean that one is such about everything. As with other virtues, exercising hope in the right way needs practice and learning. And most of us screw up quite a few times on the way.
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