Introduction
Humility is a paradoxical virtue. This should come as no great surprise. It doesn't take much explanation for one to realize that if someone is boasting about how humble he is, then he probably is not humble.
In fact, as we shall see, the paradoxical nature of humility has a long history, going back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. While it may not be a novel claim that there exists an apparent paradox of humility, I will argue that there is more than one humility paradox, perhaps as many as five: the epistemic paradox, the paradox of self-attribution, the inculcation paradox, the agentic paradox, and the axiological paradox.All these paradoxes are distinct, yet seemingly intertwined. Upon examining them each in turn, we will be left with a Gordian knot of humility paradoxes. I will begin by discussing each paradox in turn.To unravel this knot, it helps to consider what precisely humility is. In the past decade, a wellspring of new literature has emerged, offering new insight on this old virtue. Between older and more recent scholarship on this virtue, two differing conceptions of humility arise. All of them agree that a central aspect of humility has to do with how one regards oneself. On the first (and perhaps oldest) view, people's humility is based on how they assess themselves. Here humility is about having a low self-assessment (either in general or in some particular domain), whereas pride is having a high self-assessment.The second view of humility sees the trait as based not on how one views oneself, but how often one considers one's merit, status, or accomplishments. A humble person is inattentive (rather than inaccurate) to one's status. I will argue that this second conception of humility is able to cut the Gordian knot of the paradoxes of humility.
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