Humility is held to be more valuable, more morally praiseworthy, than pride. Some make this point in terms of virtues — that humility counts as virtuous, whilst pride, if not a vice, fails to be a virtue.

There are of course those who disagree with such a ranking — Aristotle is one nota­ble example of someone who seems to have had an opposing assessment of the value of these states — but on the whole philosophers and common sense opinion converge in thinking better of those who are humble than they do of those who are proud.

This raises a puzzle, however. For there are considerable similarities between pride and humility. Both, for instance, involve a relation to something that is good or valuable; both have an ‘appraisal structure' that reflects this relation; and both function to communicate this relation to others, and so have an essentially social nature. Given this, those who think humility is virtuous whilst pride is not are faced with a problem — namely, the problem of explaining this difference in our aretaic rankings of them, by appealing to some other feature or condition that suffices to distinguish the two. In this paper, I'll argue that a number of recent attempts to explain what humility is, and in so doing explain why humility is virtuous, fail on this account. In the final section, I'll suggest that a more plausible solution can be found if we locate the relevant difference in how these emotions are expressed, and in particular in the respective demands that such expressions make on us.We'll see that, whereas the communication of pride requires us to make a particular response — to esteem and give deference to the proud person — the communication of humility permits, but does not require, such an attitude. Because of this, humility allows us to bestow gifts of esteem on the humble person, in a way which we find agreeable, but also in a way that itself expresses respect for our freedom.As a result, we not only find humility more agreeable than pride; it also seems to embody a more valuable (because more respectful) motive. Or so, at least, I'll argue.

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