In this chapter I presuppose that humility, however it is to be characterised, is flanked by at least two vices: arrogance and self-abasement.
Arrogant individuals are lacking in humility. Those who self-abase are exceedingly humble. When it is conceived in these terms, there is a close association between humility and self-knowledge.
The humble individual must be cognisant of her good features or strengths to avoid belittling herself and thus losing all pride in self-abasement. She must also be aware of her bad qualities or weaknesses lest she risks becoming arrogant.I thus follow modern sensibilities in thinking of humility as a valuable corrective to widespread arrogance and narcissism (Roberts and Wood, 2007), but also to servility and self-abasement. Humility so understood is compatible with pride in one's achievements. It does not have the association, attributed to it in traditional Christian conceptions of this virtue, with low status and unworthiness.
This close connection of humility to self-knowledge is evident in the contemporary literature on the virtue of humility, and its near-synonym: modesty. Broadly speaking, recent accounts of this character trait belong to one of three families of views. The first, initiated by Driver (1989, 1999), characterises humility as requiring ignorance of one's own good qualities. The second, inaugurated by Snow (1995), describes humility in terms of knowledge of one's own limitations.The third, embraced by Bommarito (2013), Garcia (2006), and by Nadelhoffer and Wright (2017), modifies Driver's account of humility by claiming that humility involves low self-focus rather than ignorance of one's good features.
In this chapter I discuss the role that self-knowledge plays in each of these three families of views. I highlight that none of them provides a wholly satisfactory account of the virtue of humility and of its relation to self-knowledge. In their place, I propose an account of humility as a hopeful attitude toward what self-knowledge reveals about the self.
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