Humility as a corrective

Once we secularize the justification of morality, then as long as you and I socially engage with each other as free and mutually respecting equals, humility will only become desirable when our equality is breached by one of us taking an inappropriately superior attitude toward another.

So, when everyone is respecting each other’s equality, humility is not just superfluous but actually inappropriate. Nevertheless, we should expect any viable theory of humility to be able to explain all the praise it has received from saints and philosophers over the centuries, and this is easy to account for. For it is common to find people being inappropriately partial to themselves and/or to those they love and, given free rein (say by a ring of invisibility), most people are gen­erally ready to arrogate as much as they can from life.¹⁰ In Greek, this is the all-too-common vice ofpleonexia, often translated as “greed”. It is the trait associated with arrogation, or taking more than one’s fair share, and contrasted to the virtue ofjustice, or dikaiosune. Now, if arrogance were a necessary feature of human psychology, humility would then be needed by everyone, which (for reasons to be discussed below) would count in favor of it being a virtue. (Compare this with the way that everyone feels fear and to that degree everyone requires courage.) But, like all vices, arrogance is only contingent among humans (Aristotle, 2000, 1103a24-5).

One might worry that, if humility is not a virtue, any alternative account of it must be ad hoc, but this is not the case. Virtue theory already has a structure carved out into which humility naturally fits.This is to appeal to unnoticed analogies obtaining between humility and continence. But in traditional virtue theory, continence is not thought of as a virtue (Aristotle, 2000, 1145a15-17).¹² The category of trait into which continence fits was not given a name by Aristotle, but as noted above, since it is supposed to correct for incontinence, we can call it a “corrective” (see Notes 3 and 6 above). One might wonder why continence does not count as a virtue, and the answer is that, in the field of action in which continence and incontinence arises, temperance is the virtue. Continence is not an excellence, but rather more like a stop­gap measure to overcome incontinence. Incontinence is one form of intemperance, where the other is wanton self-indulgence. Incontinence is when temptation becomes too great to resist and our desires (including appetites and passions) gain mastery over us: we do what we know we ought not to do. Incontinent people are compelled by desire for what tempts them to yield to it, regardless of how misguided, inappropriate, or excessive the desire may be. Temperance is the virtue of not being tempted by what one ought not to be tempted by: temperate people distinguish good pleasures from bad ones and are not even tempted by the bad. Thus, insofar as people are temperate, they have no need of continence and are free to indulge their desires because their desires are always appropriate.¹³

Continence is employed by those who are wont to be incontinent, as a means of resisting inappropriate temptations and doing the right thing when it is difficult to do so.

What has not been noticed is the way in which an analysis of humility may be modeled on continence; notice how both involve apt self-restraint. If we understand continence as the psy­chological trait by which we restrain or correct for incontinence, humility is the psychological trait by which we restrain or correct for arrogance. Both are important for some people to have, while others have little or no need of them.

A Kantian picture of arrogant people suffices: those who are arrogant fail to give others the respect they are due. It may seem as if arrogant people have too much self-respect, more than is due, given how they treat others. But on Kant's account of arrogance, arrogant people do not have an excess of self-respect, but rather a deceptive way of fooling themselves into thinking that they have self-respect, when in fact they do not.¹⁴ Kant writes:

Arrogance [Hochmut] (superbia and, as the word expresses it, the inclination to always be on top) is a kind of ambition [Ehrbegierde] (ambitio) in which we demand that others think little of themselves in comparison with us...

(1996, p. 581)

And he certainly does not underestimate the perniciousness of arrogance, calling it in one place a “source of all evil” (1998, pp. 66—7). So, arrogance occurs when we self-righteously demand more respect than we are due or when we think of ourselves as somehow deserving more respect than others.

Yet, if arrogance is a vice which is corrected for by humility, what is the virtue which manifests the appropriate and moral attitude of the self toward the self? What plays the role of temperance in the analogy of humility to continence? The answer, as indicated above, is justice when understood as a personal virtue, as opposed to a political or institutional virtue. The quick argument for giving justice this role goes as follows.¹⁵ Justice is the virtue by which we make fair judgments about how much respect to accord to others, especially as compared to the (self-) respect one accords oneself. All injustice which involves a victim involves disrespect for that victim; for if the victim were adequately respected, the perpetrator would refrain from the injustice. And arrogance, the cause of much injustice, is also understood in terms of not giv­ing others adequate respect. On the other side, when people have over-developed the trait of humility and have become servile, they disrespect themselves in a way that is also inconsistent with justice: they are unfair to themselves. So, arrogance and servility are those traits by which we accord to others either too little or too much respect, and justice is the virtue by which by which we make fair and just assessments of how much respect to accord to ourselves and oth- ers.This is backed up by Aristotle’s gloss on the virtue,“justice is a mean between committing injustice and suffering it, since the one is having more than one’s share, while the other is having less” (2000, 1133b30).

Justice requires that we treat like cases alike, and so we ought to judge ourselves based on the same standards by which we judge others, and so justice is also the virtue by which we make fair and just assessments of ourselves.

We may note happily that thoroughly vicious, full-blown arrogance is not too common. Still, it is all too common for people to occasionally think more highly of themselves than they deserve. Arrogance comes in degrees, and most people probably arrogate just a little at least once in a while. As Butler (1900) notes, it is natural for us to not mistrust ourselves and we are inclined to be overly partial to ourselves (and whatever we love).¹⁶ It is not uncom­mon for human beings to be arrogant and so, to that degree, need to be “taken down a notch”. Thus, humility ought to enter the picture. Just as it is common for people to be inappropriately tempted, and so in need of continence, it is also common for us to get a bit too full of ourselves and be in need of humility. But insofar as we succeed in embodying justice and giving ourselves and others the respect everyone is due (and no more than that), our judgment is sound, and we are not in need of correction. If so, we have no need for humility.

Humility allows us to combat what is otherwise self-aggrandizing in our nature. It is always bad to be arrogant, but that does not make it good to always have humility, for only a few of us are always self-aggrandizing and some of us never are.To see humility as a corrective is to adopt an appropriately humble theory of humility.

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