Humility as hopeful attitude to self
I have argued so far that humility consists in adopting a range of attitudes to oneself and one's qualities that involve evaluating the self for its worth in a manner that is not biased by egocentric considerations, either in the choice of the standards against which to measure one's qualities, or in the measuring of one's features against said standards.
In this account, humility is a virtue of self-knowledge and understanding. However, this is not to say that humility consists in the possession of especially accurate self-beliefs. It is possible for a person to be humble and mistaken about her qualities.What matters for humility, however, is how this person evaluates her features and the standards she employs when making these appraisals.It might seem that humility must bring self-deprecation and nihilism in its trail.The person who assesses her significance by her contribution to humanity as a whole is bound to feel pretty insignificant. She might also think that nothing she can achieve can possibly make much difference to the course of human history. If this were true, we should refrain from thinking of humility as a virtue, since it would be contrary to the flourishing of those who possess it. I think this conclusion can be avoided by focusing on the relation between humility and hope.
Hope is an emotional orientation that includes a disposition to experience optimistic and expectant feelings, to have beliefs about the possibility of some outcome that is judged to be good, and to desire that it comes to pass.6 Hope, when directed at one's activities, also includes a propensity to think that the outcome is achievable, even though it is beyond one's immediate ability, to desire to bring it about, and a tendency to take this combination of belief, desire, and affect as a reason to attempt to achieve the desired outcomes (Martin, 2014; Snow, 2013).
Hope can be misplaced when it is directed toward outcomes that are not as a matter of fact good, or when it directed toward outcomes that cannot be achieved. Hope can also be deficient when one frequently feels or judges that achievable outcomes, which one wants to bring about, are beyond one's reach. But hope can also be well-tuned when it is directed at achievable good outcomes.Well-tuned hope is important because it supplies the motivational impetus to persevere in one's efforts to bring about desired outcomes despite the presence of obstacles in one's way.There are important conceptual connections between hope as an emotion or attitude and the virtue of humility.The adoption of a hopeful attitude toward a good outcome presupposes that one acknowledges that that outcome is not certain and that one cannot automatically guarantee it. That is, hopefulness presupposes that there are limitations to one's abilities so that one must depend on the environment and the help of other people to secure the desired outcome. In this manner, the hopeful person must be humble in at least the limited sense that he acknowledges that he has limitations and he is not wholly self-reliant (Cobb, 2019).
Hope also presupposes an assessment of which good outcomes are possible given one's abilities. Hence, hope is predicated on evaluations of one's own strengths and weaknesses to assess the likelihood that one is capable of bringing about the desired outcome.These self-appraisals are not evaluations of the worth of one's qualities within the framework of humanity as a whole. More modestly, they are appraisals as to whether one is up to the task at hand. However, a humble outlook should in ordinary contexts promote accuracy in appraisals of this sort.The absence of egocentric biasing in evaluation, irrespective of the standards that are relevant in each case, should foster judgments about what one is or is not capable of that are more reliable than those arrived at by arrogant, and generally overconfident, people or self-abasing, and usually underconfident, individuals.
In addition, hope provides the ingredient that make a difference between humility and selfabasement, as well as pessimistic fatalism or despair. Hope can generate a sense of optimism about one's ability to achieve good outcomes. It can supply the required motivation to persevere in the face of obstacles. So understood, hope is the counterbalance required to prevent humble self-knowledge from tipping into pessimistic nihilism. If this is right, humility does not merely consists in adopting a stance of low self-focus, since that evaluative framework is compatible with nihilistic paralysis. Instead, if humility is to be a virtue, it must also involve the optimistic outlook characteristic of those who are hopeful about their abilities to bring about good outcomes.
In conclusion, I have argued that there is a special relationship between the virtue of humility and self-knowledge. I have defended the view that this special connection consists in the evaluative stance taken by humble individuals toward their own features. So understood, what is special about humility is not a remarkably accurate form of self-knowledge. It is also not a matter of ignorance or inattention to the self. Instead, humility is characterised by a self-assessment and self-knowledge that is detached from a presumption of self-importance. Finally, I have indicated that this kind of self-appraisal is supplemented with an emotional and optimistic orientation toward one's ability to succeed in one's endeavours given the results of one's evaluation of one's own qualities.7
Notes
1 In her work, Driver discusses modesty and false modesty rather than humility. However, she thinks that they are near-synonyms. I follow common practice in taking Driver to provide an account of humility.
2 The conception of humility as involving (but without being limited to) an accurate appraisal of one's qualities is also popular in psychology where it has been endorsed by Tangney (2000) among others.
3 I take it that the person who is humble tout court is humble in all regards, including intellectually. However, it is possible for someone to be humble intellectually without being humble in other ways. So whilst humility entails intellectual humility, the converse does not hold.
4 I emphasise this point in the final section below.
5 See Bloomfield for the view that justice rather than humility is the virtue in this neighbourhood (Bloomfield, Ch. 3).
6 I take something along these lines to be a standard view of hope. I do not wish to take a stance here on the specific details. Clearly, however, hope requires more than the belief that some outcome is possible and a desire that it comes about, since one might have both without hoping for the outcome. Recent work on hope has emphasised its heterogeneity (cf., Bloser, 2019).
7 Thanks to Mark Alfano for useful comments on the final version of this chapter. Research leading to this paper was partially funded by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by Grant No. 58942 from the John Templeton Foundation. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or the John Templeton Foundation.
References
Alfano, M., and Robinson, B. (2014). Bragging. Thought:A Journal of Philosophy, 3(4), 263—272. doi:10.1002/ tht3.141
Battaly, H. D. (2015). Virtue. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bloser, C. (2019). Hope as an Irreducible Concept. Ratio, 32(3), 205—214. doi:10.1111/rati.12236 Bommarito, N. (2013). Modesty as a Virtue of Attention. Philosophical Review, 122(1), 93—117.
doi:10.1215/00318108-1728723
Church, I. M. (2016).The Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility. Logos and Episteme, 7(4), 413—433. Cobb,A. D. (2019). Hope for Intellectual Humility. Episteme, 16(1), 56—72. doi:10.1017/epi.2017.18 Driver, J. (1989).The Virtues of Ignorance. The Journal of Philosophy, 86(7), 373—384. doi:10.2307/2027146 Driver, J.
(1999). Modesty and Ignorance. Ethics, 109(4), 827-834. doi:10.1086/233947Driver, J. (2001). Uneasy Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Flanagan, O. (1990).Virtue and Ignorance. The Journal of Philosophy, 87(8), 420-428.
Garcia, J. L. A. (2006). Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility. Philosophia, 34(4), 417-435. doi:10.1007/s11406-006-9032-x
Hazlett,A. (2012). Higher-Order Epistemic Attitudes and Intellectual Humility. Episteme, 9(03), 205-223. doi: 10.1017/epi.2012.11
James, A. (2014). Assholes:A Theory. NewYork:Anchor Books.
Kidd, I. J. (2016). Intellectual Humility Confidence, and Argumentation. Topoi, 35(2 (Special issue on Virtue and Argumentation)), 395-402. doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9324-5
Leary, M. R., Diebels, K. J., Davisson, E. K., Jongman-Sereno, K. P., Isherwood, J. C., Raimi, K.T., Deffler, S. A., and Hoyle, R. H. (2017). Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793-813. doi:10.1177/0146167217697695
Martin,A. M. (2014). How We Hope:A Moral Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nadelhoffer,T., and Wright, J. C. (2017).The Twin Dimensions of the Virtue of Humility: Low Self-Focus and High Other-Focus. In:W Sinnott-Armstrong and C. B. Miller (Eds.), Moral Psychology: Virtues and Vices (Vol. 5, pp. 309-371). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Priest, M. (2017). Intellectual Humility: An Interpersonal Theory. Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 4(20191108). doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0004.016
Roberts, R. C., and Wood, W. J. (2007). Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Snow, N. (2013). Hope as an Intellectual Virtue. In: M. W. Austin (Ed.), Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics (pp. 152-170). New York: Palgrave Macmilllan Publishing.
Snow, N. E. (1995). Humility. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 29(2), 203-216. doi:10.1007/bf01079834
Sosa, E. (2007). A Virtue EpistemologyApt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tanesini, A. (2018). Intellectual Humility as Attitude. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96(2), 399420. doi:10.1111/phpr.12326
Tangney, J. P. (2000). Humility: Theoretical Perspectives, Empirical Findings and Directions for Future Research. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19(1), 70-82.
Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., and Howard-Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94(3), 509-539. doi:10.1111/phpr.12228
Wilson, A. T. (2016). Modesty as Kindness. Ratio, 29(1), 73-88. doi:10.1111/rati.12045
Zagzebski, L.T. (1996). Virtues of the Mind:An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.