Second lesson: humility is important, even for those in the right in contexts of disparity

We've argued that the importance of humility is limited. Some readers might conclude, with apologies to Larry David and the Templeton Foundation, that we should curb our enthusiasm about it.

It is with some unease that we will share these arguments. WE.B. Du Bois observes that slaveholders encouraged slaves to be humble:“The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chat­tel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission” (1903/1994, 121). Following suit, Nancy Snow observes that slaveholders encouraged “certain traits or ‘virtues'” in slaves, including “docility... shame, gratitude, loyalty... [and] humility,” since the humble and docile were easier to control (2004, 60).These passages make us worry that our arguments might generate grist for the mill of those who would abuse the language of humility to keep oppressed people down. But we'll share those arguments nonetheless, for two reasons. First, while there are no doubt cases where theorizing should remain unshared due to its potential for abuse, the downside risk must be weighed against upside potential. In the current case the upside potential is non-trivial, because (we'll argue) a proper understanding of the virtue of humility reveals that it is not demeaning, submissive, or degrading, but instead enables informed, forceful, and coura­geous moral and intellectual action. Second, although there is a heartening current trend in the opposite direction, moral theorizing among academic philosophers has long failed to pay suf­ficient heed to conditions of oppression.

6.2.1 Ambition

The virtue of humility helps us balance our ambition, both by tempering it and by bolstering it. As for tempering, the virtue of humility sometimes keeps us from biting off more than we can chew (Helgevold 2013, 127; Whitcomb et al., 2017, 522). That's because, when we own our limitations, we are more apt than we otherwise would be to temper our ambitions and set achievable goals.This does not mean that our goals aren't difficult; rather, it means that they aren't too difficult given our limitations. For instance, suppose a flat-earther confronts you. Thinking too highly of your powers of persuasion, you might endeavor to convince them on the spot that they are wrong, to produce a disquisition so incisive that they see the light and immediately recant. The virtuously humble are more apt to acknowledge that this goal is beyond reach. In the service of other virtues, like charity or curiosity, the virtue of humility can help one set appropriately difficult goals with respect to the flat-earther. One such goal might be to under­stand what motivates this person's belief.And another, if one is especially charitable, might be to formulate and enact a several-step plan in light of that motivation such that, once those steps are implemented, the flat-earther may begin rethinking his view. In this way, the virtue of humility can play a supporting role in relation to the virtues of charity or curiosity—it can help us set goals that are appropriately difficult instead of goals that are too difficult.

The black musician Daryl Davis (1958— ) may be a case in point. He has gradually convinced several KKK members to leave the Klan. In a documentary film about his efforts, he compares changing the mind of a Klan member to losing weight.

Y'all see this fine figure right here [indicating his ample mid-section]? I didn't put this on overnight. I want to lose it. I'm not going to lose it by tomorrow. But, if I work on it over time, it will shrink down.When you are engrained in this stuff [white supremacy], you are not going to shut it off overnight.

(Ornstein 2016, 13:58)

Davis owns his inability to immediately change the minds of Klan members; so he tempers his ambitions, thereby removing obstacles to drawing on charity, inviting Klan members to conver­sations and meals, with some success.

The virtue of humility also helps keep us from biting off less than we should. Imagine some­one who over-owns his limitations by paying too much heed to them, attributing too many shortcomings to them, and so on. Such a person might refrain from resisting racism at all, in any way, because he (wrongly) judges that he is poorly equipped for the task. Or imagine a person who incorrectly thinks his powers of interpersonal pedagogy are so limited that he can't knock even the tiniest chip away from the worldview of a flat-earther. Such a person, taking himself to be unable, might refrain from trying to make any progress with the flat-earther. In cases such as these, people refrain from setting appropriately ambitious goals not because their goals are too ambitious, but because their goals aren't ambitious enough.Their failures to set appropriately ambitious goals manifest the vice of servility, of over-owning one's limitations. The virtue of humility corrects for such failures by bolstering our ambitions. It does so by keeping us from over-owning our limitations, keeping us balanced in the mean of appropriate owning, between the extremes of excessive and deficient owning.

6.2.2 Belief

The virtue of humility also tempers and bolsters belief. With respect to tempering, it helps us to refrain from forming beliefs that outstrip our evidence, by making us aware of ways in which our evidence supports only a limited range of claims to a limited extent (Whitcomb et al., 2017, 525).

[W]e must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is.An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy....When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts are not quite representative of all that he is.

That is, humility can help us recognize that in-the-wrong parties are not monsters but rather humans, who may even occasionally, or in some domains of their lives, do things that are mor­ally or intellectually appropriate. Humility can help us recognize that our interlocutors may not possess moral and intellectual vices across all domains, though they may possess those vices and/ or perform vice-characteristic actions in some domains.

Interestingly, the virtue of humility can also help oppressed people resist internalizing the perspective of the oppressor. Since humility tends to keep us from forming beliefs that outstrip our evidence, it might help prevent oppressed people from believing they are inferior or worth­less. Just as humility can keep us from jumping to the conclusion that an in-the-wrong party is a monster or a dolt, it can keep oppressed people from jumping to the conclusion that they are inferior or worthless, or at least slow the process of internalization.

The virtue of humility doesn't only temper belief by keeping us from under-owning our limi­tations; it also bolsters belief by keeping us from over-owning our limitations.

6.2.3 Emotion

In the passage quoted above, MLK also claims that “there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies” (1963, 45).This suggests that the virtue of humility can also help us temper our emotions. It helps, first, by alerting us to our tendencies toward excess, e.g., to respond to flat-earthers with disgust or rage, and second, by enabling us to own them and so to respond appropriately, e.g., by taking steps to retrain our emotions (Coplan 2010). Sometimes, in contexts of disparity, anger is called for but white-hot rage is not; sometimes antipathy is called for but unrelenting hatred is not; sometimes dislike is called for but revulsion is not. By alerting us to our tendencies to excessive emotion and enabling us to own them, humility allows us to draw on a range of other virtues in contexts of disparity, including what Aristotle (350BCE/1998) calls “good-temper,” which involves avoiding excessive anger, i.e. being “angry at the right things and with the right people, and. as we ought, when we ought, and as long as we ought” (NE.1125b32-33, ungendered).

We can't emphasize strongly enough that, in contexts of disparity, the virtue of humility helps temper our emotions when such tempering is calledfor.We claim, not that the virtue of humility always calls for such tempering, but rather that it sometimes does. So then: when, exactly, does the virtue of humility call for the tempering of emotion in contexts of disparity? This is a difficult question to which we have no complete answer.

Tempered emotion is called for in one-off interactions with flat-earthers, when one has a tendency to respond with loathing and rage rather than dismay and frustration. Perhaps, temper­ing is even called for in some one-off interactions with neo-Nazis and Klan members, though these cases will be more complex since the normative dimension will have shifted from epis- temic ridiculousness to massive moral heinousness and one's social identity might justify a less- than-tempered response. Here, intense rage and loathing may be appropriate, even if hardened, merciless, and terrifying rage or dehumanizing hatred would be excessive.

The really difficult case, though, is horrific oppression. Might tempered emotion be called for on the part of the oppressed in the face of their oppressors? Tessman argues that an unsurpassable level of unrelenting rage and hatred is an appropriate affective response to proponents of systematic racism, in which case tempering is not called for (2005, 115—117, 124). In the same vein, bell hooks writes:“Many African Americans feel uncontrollable rage when we encounter white supremacist aggression.That rage is not pathological. It is an appropriate response to injustice” (1995, 26). In contrast, MLK, Jesus, Ghandi and others (e.g., Silvermint 2017) advise against hatred and the sort of hardened resolve against one's oppressors that leads to dehumanization. We do not feel well- positioned to resolve this dispute.³ But we do think that even if tempering anger and hatred has no place in contexts of horrific oppression, it will still be relevant in other contexts of disparity.

Crucially, the virtue of humility not only tempers but also bolsters—with emotion as well as ambition and belief. Just as it brings us to appropriately own and thus manage the limitations which are our tendencies to excess emotion, it also brings us to appropriately own and thus manage the limitations which are our tendencies to deficient emotion.When what is called for is more anger or fear or disgust or dismay, so that we are limited in not having enough of these things, the virtue of humility brings us to attend to and appropriately own, and thus manage, these emotional limita­tions. For instance, suppose that you are no longer angry with Klan members, having been numbed to them over the years.The virtue of humility would bring you to attend to and own this emotional deficiency. It would thereby set the stage for proper management. Frequently this management would consist in retraining your emotions to make them stronger, though in some cases it might consist in coming to peace with them while continuing to recognize them as deficient. Similar points apply in other cases of deficient emotion such as insufficient dismay with flat-earthers.

6.2.4 Seeking and accepting assistance

In contexts of disparity, the virtue of humility can help us seek and accept assistance when (and only when) we need it (Whitcomb et al., 2017, 524). Moreover, it can help us appropriately manage our affective responses to receiving or avoiding this assistance.

For one example, the virtue of humility can help people seek and accept assistance in their efforts to survive or resist oppression. It can help them, first, to recognize the limitations of their ability to respond to oppression alone and, second, to own the need for outside assistance, e.g., by mitigating the effects of debilitating feelings of guilt about needing and receiving assistance.⁴ In this manner, the virtue of humility might pave the way for other virtues involved in surviving or resisting oppression, e.g., courage, perseverance, and justice.⁵

For another example, imagine being challenged by a flat-earther to give them, on the spot, your evidence for why you think that the earth is round.You haven't thought about the matter since high school, and you don't remember much about it. Humility can help you to own your failure to remember, keep you from trying to fake a response, check your rising embarrassment and/or frustration with yourself. With these impediments nullified by humility, other virtues can kick in if the matter is important enough to you to pursue, e.g., curiosity, fairmindedness, and thoroughness as you throw yourself into the requisite research. In these ways, the virtue of humility helps us seek and accept assistance when we should do those things. It does this by keeping us from under-owning our limitations.

Are there also cases in which one is too inclined to seek and accept assistance or too emo­tionally at ease with doing so? And, if there are, can the virtue of humility help in these cases?

Analyses of the virtue of autonomy will tell us whether and when one can be excessively inclined to seek and accept assistance, and whether and when it is appropriate to exercise one's own agency.⁶ When the virtue of autonomy calls for exercising one's own agency, the virtue of humility can play a supporting role by keeping us from over-owning our limitations. People with the virtue of humility don't pay their limitations excessive heed, and so won't (at least not via such heed) refrain from exercising their own agency in cases where that is appropriate.

6.2.5 Engaging the Other

Believing that in-the-wrong parties are monsters, or hating them with a resolve that hardens us against their humanity, can lead us to disengage with them, to leave them to their own devices away from our clean hands. While disengagement is surely sometimes called for, surely other times it is not.Virtues such as civility, charity, and respect for others can guide us here.When they advise engagement, the virtue of humility can assist them through tempering and bolstering.

Start with tempering. Virtues such as civility, charity, and respect sometimes advise engage­ment with in-the-wrong others. When they do so, the virtue of humility, through limitations- owning, can assist by tempering our uncivil, uncharitable, and disrespectful beliefs, behavior, and emotions, making disengagement less likely. By way of illustration, return to Frederick Douglass. In the decades preceding the Civil War, some abolitionists advocated the secession of the Free States and forming a new country in which slavery was illegal, one dissociated with the remain­ing slave-holding United States. They rallied under the motto “no union with slaveholders.” Douglass (1855, 32—33) rejected this position, arguing that it

leads to false doctrines, and mischievous results... It condemns... our Savior, for eating with publicans and sinners. [moreover,] to dissolve the Union, as a means to abolish slavery, is about as wise as it would be to burn up this city, in order to get the thieves out of it..We hear the motto,“no union with slaveholders”, and I answer it. “No union with slaveholding”. I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.

Douglass argued that those in the wrong, even those heinously and ridiculously in the wrong, are not beneath our engagement. We suspect that humility helped him make this argument by tempering his ambitions, beliefs, and emotions. In any case, Douglass did engage with his oppres­sors, in his context of disparity. Even if humility did not in fact support him in this respect, it would have been apt to do as much.

Douglass has an unlikely ally in Megan Phelps-Roper, who left the cult-like Westboro Baptist Church in 2012, an anti-Semitic and anti-gay hate group comprised almost entirely of the Phelps-Roper family. She credits her departure to others outside the Church who engaged her. In her Ted talk, she encourages such engagement:

My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles, only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed ques­tions tempered with kindness and humor..They approached me as a human being and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage.

(Phelps-Roper 2017)

Here we see the tempering of belief, behavior, and emotion that humility can provide, curtailing unrelenting rage and hatred toward people like Phelps-Roper, helping us to avoid jumping to the conclusion that she is a monster, and enabling suitable engagement.⁷

The virtue of humility not only tempers belief, behavior, and emotion by keeping us from under-owning our limitations, but also bolsters those things by keeping us from over-owning limitations. The bolstering, no less than the tempering, can help us engage in-the-wrong oth­ers in cases where virtues like charity and civility call on us to do as much. This is because over-owning one's limitations, no less than under-owning them, can make one disinclined to engage. People who over-own their limitations might be disinclined to engage in-the-wrong others because they mistakenly fail to be angry or dismayed with those in-the-wrong others, or because they mistakenly think they can't make a worthwhile difference and fail to set appropri­ately ambitious goals. The virtue of humility blocks these kinds of failures to engage because, keeping us from over-owning our limitations, it bolsters our beliefs and emotions.

6.3