Kant on the vices of humility

Kant's account of humility has the virtue of defining it as a lowly opinion of oneself. But an individual's opinion of herself might be justified or unjustified. Most of what Kant has to say about humility concerns unjustified forms of it, chief among which is servility.

In The Metaphysics of Morals (1996c) Kant identifies servility as one of the vices opposed to duties all persons have to themselves, contrasting it with both self-respect and arrogance (6: 434—437).³² His discussion begins by emphasizing the dignity, the unsurpassable and uncondi­tional moral worth, that persons have simply as persons, that is, as rationally autonomous moral agents. Each person has dignity, and so the authority to “exact respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world” (6: 435). Each of us also has a duty to respect ourselves, i.e., a duty to not disavow our dignity but to act always with consciousness of our status and worth as equal persons. Servility is deliberate self-abasement: “the disavowal of all claim to any moral worth in oneself” that is “contrary to one's duty to oneself since it degrades one's personality” (6: 436).

As Hill (1991) has usefully argued, servility is the absence of a certain kind of self-respect, which I call “interpersonal recognition self-respect.”³³ This is the reflexive form of the respect that each person is owed and “exacts” from every person. Interpersonal recognition respect is the practical acknowledgement of a person as a being with dignity and the moral status of an equal among equals. Recognition respect for persons is a categorical moral duty: the End in Itself formulation of the Categorical Imperative, on my reading of it, declares that our funda­mental moral obligation is to respect persons.³⁴

Interpersonal recognition self-respect involves understanding and valuing oneself as an equal person among persons with the moral authority to demand from all others, and the right to be accorded, the same practical acknowledgement of one's dignity and moral status that all per­sons are owed, as well as a categorical duty to acknowledge one's worth and status in relation to others' actions and attitudes, and living in light of this self-understanding and self-valuing.

Interpersonal recognition respect and self-respect are core concerns to feminists inasmuch as they justify and can motivate liberatory struggle against all forms of unjust hierarchies in which the dignity and equality of all persons is denied.

The servile person disavows his dignity and invites others to regard him as a being with the status of moral inferior. The low opinion of self-worth and status that servility involves makes it clear that it is a kind of humility;³⁵ the deliberate discounting of one's dignity makes it clear that it is a vice.Two features make servility deeply bad. First, servility is “false humility” (6: 436), in that its invitation to others to regard one as a being of a lesser sort reflects a false view, both of one's own moral status and worth and also of the moral status and worth of all persons. In its denial that one is an equal member of the moral community with the same dignity and right to respect as every other member, servility conveys the false view that the moral community is not a relation of equals but, rather, a hierarchy of two moral castes, one composed of beings with higher moral status and greater fundamental worth, and the other, to which one belongs, of beings with lower status and less worth who are entitled to much less, maybe nothing, in the way of consideration and respect.

The false picture is reiterated in sociocultural contexts of domination and subordination. Servile subordinates are meekly submissive, acquiescing in their inferiorization.Their servil­ity also encourages members of dominant groups to view social subordinates as inherently inferior and themselves as inherently superior, which bleeds easily from social contexts into attitudes about what is morally appropriate regarding each group.

Kant objects to servility for a second reason: it is also “lying humility.” The servility with which Kant is concerned is not a matter of the possibly blameless misunderstanding of one's worth and status that might, for example, cause someone raised in a racist or sexist society to believe she is inherently inferior to others. Rather, the servile person lies about his moral status, worth, and rights; and his lies are motivated, as lies typically are, by desires for something. It's not that the servile person doesn't care at all about worth; rather, he trades in his dignity in order to “acquire a borrowed worth” or “as a means to acquiring the favor of another” (6: 435—436). Instead of exacting the respect that is his due as a person, the servile individual seeks to “borrow” worth from the value that others ascribe to him for qualities such as his submissiveness, useful­ness, or flattering dependence. The servile person, that is, wants others to value him so that he can value himself in reflection. He thus sacrifices his interpersonal recognition self-respect for another form of valuing: self-esteem. Self-esteem is a self-approving attitude, “thinking well of oneself” or “feeling good about oneself,” that, according to psychologists, need not be grounded in anything about oneself that is morally significant and typically derives from how one is regarded by others.³⁶

In letting the desire for self-esteem determine his self-valuing, the servile individual makes himself, as Kant says,“a plaything of the mere inclinations and hence a thing” (6: 420).Through its willingness to let one's choices be determined by inclinations rather than by reason, servility degrades that which, on Kant's view, is most truly one's self: the rationality that makes one a person. Servility is thus a violation of self-respect and a deeply serious vice.

In contrast with servility, which waives all claims to moral worth and invites others to deny one the respect one is owed, arrogance “demands from others a respect it denies them” (6: 465).

Arrogance, Kant says, is the inclination to think highly of oneself, but it asks “not what one is worth, but how much more one is worth than another”; the arrogant person “already believes in his own worth, but he esteems it solely by the lesser status of other people” (Kant 1997; 27: 241). Because the arrogant person falsely believes that the only worth all persons have is comparative, he regards neither himself nor others as beings with dignity unconditionally deserving respect. Indeed, Kant says, the arrogant person is always “mean in the depths of his soul,” for he knows that “were his fortune suddenly to change, he himself would not find it hard to grovel and to waive any claim to respect from others” (6: 466). Significantly, the “meanness” that is prepared to waive all claims to respect is the same self-abasement that characterizes servility. That is, the arrogant are servile at heart.

Both servility and arrogance are false and lying stances toward the self. They rest on inter­personal comparisons: one has either more or less worth, a higher or lower status, more or fewer rights than others.They share the same hierarchical view of the moral community, differing only with regard to where one locates oneself—at least for now, for the two stances are but alterna­tive ploys in the competition for comparative worth.The view of relative status and comparative value that they share lies about the incomparable, unconditional, and equal dignity of all persons.

Now, Kant makes it clear that servility is not the only false form of humility. Indeed, all humility that involves comparing oneself to other human beings and valuing oneself less is false (6: 435; 27: 349). It is important to recognize that Kant's objection applies to interpersonal com­parisons on any value dimension, including merits, accomplishments, personal qualities, social position, likeability, etc. It is thus specious to identify virtuous humility as involving any beliefs about one's lesser worth or importance relative to others.

What's more, Kant regards interpersonal humility as morally dangerous because it inevi­tably becomes competitive. For “when a human being values his own worth according to others, he seeks either to raise himself above others or to diminish the value of others” (Kant 2007; 9: 491). Interpersonal humility is thus just another arena for competition, as one tries to “equal or surpass others in [being humble]... believing that in this way one will gain even greater inner worth” (6: 435). Interpersonal comparison always gives rise to competition, and competitors always seek to win, to come out on top: ambitio et superbia. Thus even in the humility arena, interpersonal arrogance is at work: the individual who takes others as the measure of his own worth and holds a low opinion of himself is, as Kant says, “actually proud thereby” (27: 349).

Interpersonal humility, then, is at bottom just arrogance in disguise, as arrogance is just humility in waiting. Interpersonal humility not only does not correct interpersonal arrogance, but leads to or expresses it and involves the same false view of the worth ofpersons.They are the same kind of violation of one's categorical moral duty of interpersonal recognition self-respect. Interpersonal humility is not a virtue, but as serious a vice as interpersonal arrogance.

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