Humility as a virtue of self-knowledge

Whilst Driver thinks that humility consists in having false beliefs about one's good qualities, a number of philosophers, starting with Snow (1995), have argued that humility presupposes self­knowledge.

Whilst Snow includes an affective component in her account of humility, other related views focus exclusively on knowledge of one's own limitations and ignore the different kinds of attitude that one might take to this knowledge. This approach is exemplified by Hazlett's view that intellectual humility is the disposition to adopt the correct second-order doxastic attitude toward the epistemic statuses of one's first-order doxastic attitudes such as belief, disbelief, or suspension of belief (Hazlett, 2012, p. 220). Church's view that intellectual humility is the virtue of accurately tracking the positive epistemic status of one's own beliefs provides another exam­ple of this approach (Church, 2016, p. 425). Both accounts identify intellectual humility with self-knowledge. Those who are intellectually humble know (or at least are rationally sensitive to the evidence about) how much to rely on their current views. Hence, they are able to revise them or stand firm depending on what kind of counter-evidence emerges.

The intuition underpinning these accounts is that intellectual humility is the virtue flanked by vices of over- and under-confidence in the correctness of one's opinions.

These accounts are intended exclusively to apply to intellectual humility rather than humility per se. Nevertheless, since the person who is humble is presumably also intellectually humble (but not necessarily vice versa),³ it should be impossible for someone to count as intellectually humble by these definitions and yet fail to be generically humble. Counter-examples, however, are easily generated. Imagine a Galileo figure who is a brilliant scientist. One of the reasons for his brilliance is his ability to modulate his level of confidence in his views with the available evidence. Galileo is not over- or under-confident. His confidence in his views and intellectual abilities is warranted. He is the best scientist around by any objective standards. However, Galileo is also a bully. He mocks other scientists who are not as good on their feet as he is. He also likes to let everyone know how good he is. Intuitively, this person is a jerk (James, 2014). He is also arrogant. Given the plausible assumption that it is impossible to be both arrogant and intellec­tually humble, this example shows that a person's confidence in one's views might be accurate without that person being intellectually humble.

I hasten to add that this fictional example might just be that: fictional. In reality, arrogant individuals tend to display overconfidence in their views and abilities (Leary et al., 2017).⁴ Nevertheless, since it is at least conceivable that there might be arrogant people who mistreat others but are not overconfident, these purely doxastic accounts of intellectual humility appear to be at best incomplete. At the very least, what is required (in addition to knowledge of one's strengths, weaknesses, and well-placed confidence in one's views and abilities) is the right atti­tude toward that knowledge so that it is not used to put others down or merely to self-enhance.

The so-called ‘limitations-owning' account of intellectual humility makes a step in this direc­tion (Whitcomb et al., 2017).

Despite all of this, in my view the limitations-owning account is not sufficiently distinct from purely doxastic views of humility. Thus, it shares some of their defects. I suspect that when Whitcomb and colleagues think of humility as requiring that one acknowledges one's limita­tions, what they have in mind is a person who is not in denial about these. Understood in this minimal sense, acceptance of limitations is compatible with hiding them from other people's scrutiny. Whitcomb and colleagues embrace this consequence. They argue that a person might possess the dispositions characteristic of intellectual humility whilst being wholly selfishly moti­vated. Such an individual would be humble but not virtuous, since he would lack the required motivation to pursue epistemic goods (2017, p. 520).They describe the case of a student who accepts her limitations and strives to improve herself, but whose behaviour is wholly driven by the desire to get good grades without any pressing concern to learn, unless that learning ulti­mately gets her good grades (2017, p. 521).

In my view there are many circumstances in which this hypothetical student would engage in conduct incompatible with being humble. For example, she would pretend that she knows something that she does not know, if this pretence could be instrumental in getting good grades. Thus, this student could put down other people, hide her own shortcomings, and even brag about her alleged strengths all in the interest of improving her grades.Whatever we want to say about this student, it is implausible that we wish to describe her as humble (Tanesini, 2018, p. 405). Counter-examples such as this one suggest that the ‘limitation-owning’ account does not give sufficient weight to the thought that to be humble it is not enough that one knows one’s shortcomings; one must also relate to these in the right way, which includes owning up to them in front of other people.

In addition, the account’s exclusive focus on limitations rather than strengths and weaknesses can also be questioned. This focus raises the possibility also acknowledged by Whitcomb and colleagues that a person might be humble without knowing her good qualities (Whitcomb et al., 2017, pp. 528-533).This conclusion entails that a person could be both humble and servile, or under-confident about her abilities.This result seems wrong given the intuitive understand­ing of humility as a virtue opposed to servility.

Finally, and this is an objection that can be raised against every account of humility discussed so far, this account fails to capture the sense in which humility is incompatible with being self­centred or highly focused on the importance of the self and of its features.This objection sug­gests that irrespective of whether humble individuals must have a good grasp of their strengths and shortcomings, possession of this knowledge about the self cannot be sufficient for humility. Instead, this virtue must be understood by examining how humble individuals value their own importance.

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