Modesty as hedonic indifference, kindness, and inattention

Suppose we move away from ‘doxastic' accounts, which focus on some putative epistemic dif­ference between the states, and look to some non-doxastic element to solve our puzzle. In this section I'll examine accounts which appeal to differences in pleasure, kindness, and attention, in attempting to show why humility, but not pride, counts as virtuous.

(i) Even if pride and humility share a certain appraisal structure, one rather obvious difference between them is at the level of hedonics. This is because pride would seem to involve a subject's taking pleasure in the fact that the relevant relation bears positively on their stand­ing, whilst the humble subject does not. In support of the former, note that the typical facial expression of pride is one in which the subject seems pleased with herself and her achieve­ment.⁹ Pride and pleasure seem very closely linked, therefore. Not so with humility, which some want to characterize in terms of a lack of any pleasure. Indeed, a number of accounts of humility highlight precisely that it involves an indifference to the fact that one's relation to some good bears positively on one's standing.¹⁰ On this account, it is the fact that one fails to take pleasure in the relevant fact that makes the person virtuous; conversely, those who are proud fail to be virtuous precisely because they take pleasure in the fact of their relation to some good.

Does this solve our puzzle? Not really. For one thing, the pleasure that pride involves is often entirely fitting from a moral perspective. Suppose that Lucy has just been made cap­tain of the school football team; Lucy, and others, would expect Lucy's parents to be beaming with pride at this achievement. This is not just an expectation, reflective of how parents tend to react in cases like this. There would be something morally and normatively amiss if Lucy's parents didn’t take pleasure in this fact.

Hurka is not alone in taking virtue to be a way of favouring what is good. Robert Adams holds something similar, claiming: “I identify virtue with persisting excellence in being for the good”.¹⁵ Linda Zagzebski also holds that virtues involve positive attitudes towards goods and negative attitudes towards evils, embodied in the emotional responses that constitute the ‘motivational components’ of virtue.¹⁶ Indeed, virtue theorists in general — no doubt influenced by Aristotle to some extent — deny that taking pleasure in (virtuous) activity in any sense undermines the virtue-status of that activity.

(ii) A different approach appeals, not to pleasure, but to kindness. Consider, in this light, Alan Wilson’s 2014 paper ‘Modesty as Kindness'.¹⁷Wilson thinks that accounts of modesty which restrict themselves to “features internal to an agent”,¹⁸ such as beliefs about their own abili­ties or comparisons with others, allow “for the agent to be both proud and obnoxiously boastful about some ability that they possess”.¹⁹ For Wilson,“What is needed is an external requirement — a restriction of how the truly modest agent will behave in their interactions with other people”. (Ibid.) Wilson’s own requirement invokes kindness. He writes:

My suggestion is that the trait of modesty ought to be considered as closely related to the more fundamental virtue of kindness. It is at least part of the nature of kindness that the kind agent will be concerned to protect and promote the well-being of others.The modest agent is one who shares this concern and who is influenced by it in the way that they present themselves.... To be modest is to be disposed to present your accomplishments/positive attributes in a way that is sensitive to the potential negative impact on the well-being of others, where this disposition stems from a concern for that well-being.²⁰

Wilson thinks that this allows us to explain why modesty is virtuous. Part of the explana­tion here is that the modest person, being kind, will be concerned not to undermine the esteem of others, and so will avoid “bragging and boasting about their achievements”. As a result, the humble person “is unlikely to provoke envy and dislike in others”, and so will maintain cordial social relations. Since this is a good end, then modesty will be reliably connected with this end. But the main reason for viewing modesty in a positive light is because of a close relation to an overarching virtue.

There is a lot that is attractive about Wilson’s account. Unfortunately, it suffers from a couple of problems. First, it seems to be too narrow in its focus on the potential negative impact on the well-being of others. Consider Andy Murray again. I take it that Andy can be modest when he is motivated to downplay his impressiveness, even in situations where there is little or no chance of negative impact on the well-being of others. Suppose, for instance, he is at a dinner celebrating Grand Slam winners since 2010. Surely it’s possible for him to be modest, and yet rightly unconcerned with the effect that his talking about his accomplishments might have on the well-being of Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic. So his motivation to downplay his achievements here cannot be kindness to them.

Second, and importantly, the appeal to kindness doesn't really help us to solve our puz­zle. This is because pride can equally fit Wilson's definition: the proud person can also be disposed to present her accomplishments or positive attributes in a way that is sensitive to the potential impact on the well-being of others, where this disposition stems from a concern for that well-being. For the proud person might sometimes be disposed to display pride because of the positive impact this will have on the well-being of others: think again of Lucy's proud parents being sensitive to the benefit such an emotional expression brings to their daughter, or sensitive to the harm that their failure to express pride in Lucy's achieve­ments might cause.

(iii) A third recent approach, due to Nicolas Bommarito, grounds the value of modesty in “cer­tain patterns of attention”.²² Like Wilson, Bommarito thinks that “a good theory will... provide a framework that helps us see what is good about modesty and what is bad about immodesty”.²³ He thinks that “what is essential to modesty is that we direct our attention in certain ways”, and that as a result modesty is a virtue of attention.²⁴ In particular, he claims that the modest person will direct her attention “away from the trait or its value or toward the outside causes and conditions that played a role in developing it”.²⁵ So a modest person might not attend to the fact that she is a skillful driver, or to the value of her architectural work; or she might instead focus on the vital role that others have played in enabling her to fulfil her talent and achieve what she does. But these patterns of attention are not suf­ficient for modesty; instead, the modest person's attention must be directed in one of these ways “for the right reasons. [as] a result of their values or desires”. (Ibid.) In the case of someone who attends to external factors and their role in enabling her to exhibit her skill, attention is governed by her concern for the importance of family, friends, and society; so her attention seems virtuous as a result.

This, too, is a rich and initially attractive account of the nature of modesty and its value. However, it is problematic for much the same reason as Wilson's — namely, it doesn't do enough to distinguish (the value of) modesty from pride, and so fails to address our puzzle. Modesty and pride might very well differ in terms of their patterns of attention — with the proud person being more attentive to their own qualities or the value of these qualities than the modest person, and less attentive to the role that external factors have played with respect to the value in question. But none of these differences need evince morally prob­lematic desires or concerns on the part of the proud person. Indeed, the case can be made that dispositions to attend to one's abilities can reliably express virtuous dispositions them­selves. The proud Olympian might reliably attend to her abilities and their value because she thinks that inattention to her talents would be neglectful or sinful: she pays attention to them and to their value because she regards them as a gift, and, as with other gifts, attention (rather than inattention) seems apt as a form of gratitude. By the same token, she might be less attentive to the role that external factors have played with respect to her achievements precisely because external factors have had little to do with her success. Instead, any external factors she has faced have been ones that she has had to overcome: poverty, lack of parental support, indifference of funding bodies, the sexist or racist attitudes of the selection com­mittees and fans and broadcasters, the jealousy of her team-mates; and so on.The notion, therefore, that relative inattention to help from others belies a morally problematic attitude would seem to be unfounded. Indeed, it might even be the case that those who are inclined to pay attention to the help they received from others are often more privileged than those who are not, precisely because the latter group of people didn't receive much help in the first place. It is not obvious, therefore, that paying attention to the help one received from others manifests a morally better attitude than paying attention to one's own abilities and the value of one's own achievements. It is therefore not clear why modesty is a virtue of attention whilst pride is not.

The lesson to be learnt from this discussion is that attempts to explain the difference in value between pride and humility that focus solely on the features of the subjects involved — whether doxastic elements like beliefs (inaccurate or accurate), hedonic elements like pleas­ure (or indifference), or virtues associated with kindness and attention — seem to fail. If we are to answer our puzzle, we should look elsewhere. In the final section, I'll make the case that we should shift focus to the reactions of others to those who display pride and humility. I'll suggest that those who are proud are less highly regarded than those who are humble, because pride requires or demands esteem from us, whilst humility makes esteem a gift that we can bestow. This is the case even if pride and humility each express or manifest virtues associated with kindness or attention.

9.4