True story: when the female members of a colleague’s research lab learned of his plans to study humility, they remarked: “Humility is exactly what you need more of, if you’re a white male!” Subtext: humility is uncalled for when you’re oppressed. Frederick Douglass observed something similar with respect to the horrific source of oppression that was American slavery:
With a book in my hand so redolent of the principles of liberty, and with a perception of my own human nature and of the facts of my past and present experience, I was equal to a contest with the religious advocates of slavery, whether white or black; for blindness in this matter was not confined to the white people.
I have met, at the south, many good, religious colored people who were under the delusion that God required them to submit to slavery and to wear their chains with meekness and humility. I could entertain no such nonsense as this...(Douglass 1892, 104-105)
Humility seems the last thing the enslaved need. More generally, and to put it mildly, humility seems to be an inappropriate response for the oppressed toward their oppressors. It seems inappropriate elsewhere too. If you find yourself accosted by a neo-Nazi who advocates reinstating the Final Solution, humility seems like the wrong response, just as it does when you’re evangelized by a flat-earther. In sum, humility seems inappropriate as a response in a variety of contexts. But how can this be? If humility is a virtue, and if to act virtuously is to act well, how can it ever be inappropriate to act humbly?
To sharpen this puzzle, we’ll use the phrase “contexts of disparity” to capture interactions in which people differ dramatically along a normative dimension, where some are in the right and others are in the wrong. If you’re an oppressed person interacting with your oppressor, or if you’re buttonholed by neo-Nazis or flat-earthers, you are in a context of disparity. In each case, you differ dramatically from others along a normative dimension—social power in the case of oppression, moral credentials in the case of neo-Nazism, and epistemic credentials in the case of flat-earthism—and you are in the right and they are in the wrong. To be sure, there are important differences across different “contexts of disparity” For instance, the oppressed are harmed systematically (and often horrifically) whereas those who face wielders of heinous or ridiculous views may be harmed in one-off ways or even not harmed at all. In terms of harm, then, some contexts of disparity are utterly unimportant compared to others. Nonetheless, the concept of “contexts of disparity” captures something important these interactions all share: due to a dramatic normative difference, humility seems to misadvise those who are in the right about how to respond to those who are in the wrong.
Again we wonder: how can this be? Is it because humility is not a virtue, as Hume (1751/1975) argued? Or is it instead that genuine virtues sometimes misadvise us? Or, if they never misadvise us, are they nonetheless sometimes unimportant or irrelevant or silent? Or might it so happen that humility gives us correct advice after all, even when we are in the right in contexts of disparity? This thicket of questions entangles us; what follows is our attempt to work through it.
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