Distinctions

Both “humility” and “democracy” are multifaceted terms, so it behooves us to clarify the con­cepts and how we will be using them throughout this essay. The first such distinction relevant to applying humility to democracy hinges on what we might call “cognitive” versus “conative” humility.

On the heels of these distinctions, we should also note that we will be treating “humility” as a bi-valent term.That is, we will understand humility as a virtue that admits of corresponding vices of excess and deficiency (Church and Samuelson, 2016). This choice is not obvious since one prominent theoretical and ordinary-language meaning of humility treats it as univalent: a person is either humble and virtuous, or arrogant and blameworthy. Eliot, a devout Christian, follows an important tradition according to which we are radically fallen creatures who should be maximally humble: that “humility is endless.” One might also use humility to anchor one end of a dichotomy and claim, pace Eliot, that the virtuous characteristic is to be found somewhere in the middle.

Instead, we will treat “humility” as the virtuous mean between two vicious extremes. In the case of cognitive (or intellectual) humility, the vice in which we are insufficiently humble is “arrogance,” and the vice in which we are overly humble is “diffidence.” Correspondingly, for conative humility, the vice in which we are insufficiently humble is “greed,” and the vice in which we are overly humble is “abnegation.”The virtuous mean of conative humility might also be described as knowing and asserting our proper self-worth (Neblo, 2007a).

Similarly, “democracy” is a capacious concept that means many things to different people. For our purposes, we will not insist on a single, encompassing definition, but rather distinguish between three ideal-typical notions of democracy, and then examine the role of humility in them separately. We do not necessarily mean that humility is required in each of these under­standings of democracy in order for them to self-perpetuate, but that for each system to provide desirable goods, some form of humility must be present somewhere in the process.These goods include improvements in the epistemic dynamics of deliberation and the power dynamics of democratic decision making. Desirable epistemic dynamics require that the right people assert and defer in the proper contexts, while desirable power dynamics emerge when people humbly adhere to their roles. We shall focus on three broad theoretical genera of democracy, further distinguishing species under them only as it seems necessary (Neblo, 2007b).We call the three main theories we will analyze as follows: competitive-elitist democracy, liberal democracy, and deliberative democracy.¹

Competitive-elitist theories of democracy focus on securing peaceful transitions of power between elites elected by the masses at semi-regular intervals.These are sometimes called “defla­tionary” theories because they are relatively unambitious regarding the standards that they apply for policy success. Such theories generally disavow notions of a common good, or at a least reli­able means of knowing and securing such a common good, should it exist.Weber, Schumpeter, Riker, and, more recently,Achen and Bartels fall under this category.

Calling the next group “liberal” theories invites some confusion because the concept of liberal­ism is at best oblique to democracy.That said, as an empirical matter, the combination (liberalism paired with democracy) co-occurs often enough to treat it as a sort of genus.The “liberal” part of liberal democracy tends to focus on pluralism, individual rights, limited government, the separation ofpowers—that is, limits or at least inflections on what democratic majorities can accomplish. Some variants are skeptical of singular notions of the common good, though many would acknowledge a finite number of competing notions of the good. Others countenance the idea of a common good but counsel caution, arguing that liberal constraints conduce toward it (or at least hedge against grave deviations). Madison and, more recently, Brennan (2009) typify this latter approach.

Deliberative theories of democracy embody more ambitious standards for forming and judg­ing policy decisions than the other two theories, and non-elites generally play a more important role in deliberative theories as well (Neblo et al., 2018). Though only a few embrace a strong, singular theory of the common good, they almost all have some robust notion of better and worse arguments in favor of prospective policy choices, and in judging their consequences after the fact (Neblo, 2005). Habermas, Mansbridge, Cohen, Dryzek, Fishkin, as well as Gutmann and Thompson have all proposed theoretical variants on the deliberative model (Bachtiger et al., 2010).

Finally, we distinguish between the kind and degree of humility required by the various roles that one might play in an actually functioning democracy. One tends to think of citizens (or perhaps all those subject to the political power of a given jurisdiction) as the obvious agents who relate to each other in terms of humility, arrogance, and diffidence, or greed and abnega­tion. Nearly all modern democracies, however, are representative democracies. So we must dis­tinguish between the officials who make and enforce law and policy, and those subject to those laws and policies, but, being subject to them, typically elect their representatives (Minozzi et al., 2015). In addition to being representative, modern democracies are also typically large, complex states, governing a wide array of policy areas.Thus the role of policy experts in democracies has grown dramatically in the modern era; below, we will discuss the pattern of virtues necessary for the proper functioning of democracy according to each model as broken out by citizens, officials, and experts (Goold et al., 2012).

11.3