Humility and professional practice

Not only is humility relevant to the organizational dimensions of the legal professions, but it is also essential to achieve excellence in legal practice. Law is, first and foremost, an argumentative enterprise.Argumentation is the backbone of legal practice, be it at a courtroom, the classroom, a public defender office, executive agency, state legislature or union, law is in the business of reasoned decision-making.

The virtue of humility is particularly relevant in group deliberation and decision-making. This importantly adds to its value in the context of the legal professions, given that some of the most important legal decisions are taken by collective bodies (i.e., by multi-member courts, the jury, executive committees, etc.). Humility enhances group-deliberation in law in a variety of ways. First, humility contributes to generating the background conditions needed to enable a productive deliberation. To begin with, it helps generate an egalitarian ethos among the mem­bers of the deliberating group which increases the likelihood that group deliberation will reach better decisions than those that would be reached by its individual members, as it makes it more likely that all views are heard and taken seriously.

Second, in addition to promoting an egalitarian, cooperative, and inclusive deliberative envi­ronment, humility aids members of deliberating bodies to tackle disagreement. The person with the virtue of humility would respond to disagreement by ‘reflecting in the nature of their evidence... considering the other person's reasons for thinking otherwise, being willing to respectively discuss the issue further, and all the time showing a willingness to change her mind' (Pritchard: 2018).These dispositions, which are absent in the arrogant, enable a genuine collective deliberation and help deliberators face disagreement in ways that avoid obtuse self­encroachment in their respective positions and antagonism. It is critical to note that humility does not demand that, in cases of peer disagreement, the person downgrades his epistemic assessment of the issue under discussion (Pritchard: 2018). Quite the contrary, straightforwardly lowering one's epistemic assessment of the contested issue in light of disagreement would signal a lack of humility. The virtue of humility demands that, when disagreeing, one be willing to listen to other's people's views and to seriously consider conflicting evidence, which may or may not result in a change in view. To respond to disagreement by holding one's views as less justified, by the sheer fact of the disagreement, or lowering one's commitment in them to the point of withdrawing them and surrendering to someone else's position would manifest intel­lectual diffidence or servility, rather than humility.

Last, humility also helps group deliberation by preventing some well-known failures of group deliberation from arising.⁶ Phenomena that distort group deliberation include amplification of individual cognitive biases; homogenization, i.e., the reduction of the variety of information available within the group; polarization, i.e., the adoption by members of the group of a more extreme version of their own pre-deliberative positions, and domination, i.e., the shifting of attitudes within the group toward those hold by its socially advantaged members (Sunstein and Hastie: 2015 and Luskin et al., 2015).There are two main reasons that help explain these deliber­ative failures: informational influences, so that people who are in a minority position self-silence on the grounds that their own judgment must be wrong; and social influences, for fear of social sanctions may lead people to silence themselves. Humility helps address the two main forces driving deliberative distortions.The proper self-confidence that is characteristic of the intellec­tually humble would prevent minority members from thinking that their beliefs are wrong by the mere fact that they contradict the majority position. Informational influences would thus be counteracted and minority beliefs shared, which results in an increase of the cognitive diversity within the group that importantly enhances group deliberation. Humility also helps contain social influences. Humility, as argued, contributes to generating an egalitarian, cooperative, and inclusive deliberative environment, which makes it less likely that those who hold a minority position or are members of a minority group self-silence for fear of being ridiculed, rejected, or harmed in their reputation.

Humility may also be helpful in reducing the specific failings involved in some of these deliberative failures.⁷ ‘Group polarization' may be reduced if deliberators show some of the dis­positions that are associated with humility and that help deal with disagreement in a productive way, such as openness to other's people viewpoints, willingness to modify one's positions, and a disposition to change one's mind. Humility may also be helpful in mitigating the cascade effects (i.e., when people follow the statements previously made, ignoring their private knowledge) and ‘common knowledge' effects (i.e., when shared information crowds out information held by one or few members) that result in ‘homogenization.'An appraisal of oneself as a cognitive agent that avoids both self-aggrandizing and, critically for these cases, self-diminishing, is useful for avoiding a tendency to simply follow the lead of predecessors or adhere to shared views within the group. ‘Domination' may also be mitigated when deliberators have the virtue of humility and are thereby committed to an egalitarian stance, which would prevent social disadvantage from translating into loss of credibility or lack of participation.

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