Conclusion
In this chapter, I have presented the view (argued for by my colleagues and I elsewhere, see Nadelhoffer and Wright, 2017, Nadelhoffer, et al., 2017;Wright, et al., 2017, 2018) that humility is an epistemically and ethically aligned state of awareness.
Humility's epistemic alignment orients us toward reality, allowing us to experience and evaluate things as they actually are. Humility's ethical alignment orients us toward others, allowing us to deeply understand and experience the needs, etc. of other morally relevant beings.Thus, humility is a state of awareness free from the many centeredness generated biases that distort and/or otherwise interfere with our ability to perceive, identify, understand, and properly evaluate the significance of the facts, as well as to properly weigh the needs, desires, interests, beliefs, goals, and values of others, in determining what we ought (or ought not) do. It also silences the internal conflict or “corruption” that would otherwise interfere with us acting on those determinations. This makes humility foundational to mature virtue and moral functioning, and moral exemplarity.Notes
1 While my colleagues and I are also highly critical of the self-abasement view of humility, we have nonetheless found evidence for a limited potential role for self-abasement in humility development (Nadelhoffer and Wright, 2017, Nadelhoffer,Wright, Echols, Perini, and Venezia, 2017). Specifically, we found evidence that the experience of being humbled, of being “brought down” to see oneself as “lowly”, of being humiliated in the eyes of another (and/or of oneself) may sometimes play an crucial role in the initial shifting of one's psychological positioning relative to other living beings and the larger universe.Thus, while self-abasement may be problematic as the centerpiece of humility, it may nonetheless have something to offer at the early stages of humility development.
2 This is not to say that morality cannot (or should not) accommodate agent-centric motivations and reasons—for example, something might be morally appropriate to do at least in part because it contributes to your own wellbeing, or the wellbeing of those closest to you.
3 This is a view my we have argued for both theoretically and empirically—for example, our analysis of people's folk concept of humility provided support for this view, showing that children, adolescents, and adults are sensitive to both the epistemological and ethical alignment features of humility (Nadelhoffer, et al., 2017). I also found support for this view cross-culturally, interviewing people across five countries in SE Asia (Wright, 2019).
4 Interestingly, it also suggests that while moral exemplars are likely to differ in many respects from one another, to have very different personalities, the one thing that they will all share is humility.
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