Why humility is not a virtue

As noted at the outset, the history of humility is complicated. The word for it was originally derogatory and implied submissiveness and lack of self-reliance. “Humilitas” in Latin translates from the Greek ταπεtνoς,"tapeinos", which means “groveling” or “lowly”; its antonym,“kalon”, was “nobility”.

Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

Blessed are the sorrowful; they shall find consolation.

Blessed are the gentle [the humble, the meek], they shall have the earth for their possession...

You have heard that they were told, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' But what I tell you is this: Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also. If someone in authority presses you into service for one mile, go with him two.

(1989, Matthew, 5: 5, 38-41)

However reassuring this may be to the hopelessly powerless, it is striking how it contravenes ordinary notions of social justice: do not resist those who wrong you? (What would Jesus have said about the ancient [even in his day] slavery ofJews in Egypt? Should the Jews have built an extra pyramid? Was Moses wrong to resist?) In any case, faith in divine justice inverted the moral status of humility, and what was once derogatory, i.e., accepting one's inferior place, became laudatory.

If God exists, then justice rightly demands humility before God. As Kant says, “We have reason to harbour a low opinion of our person. For if we compare ourselves with the holy moral law, we discover how remote we are from congruity with it” (1997, p. 129 [27:348f]).⁵ This seems all the more true if one accepts the doctrine of Original Sin. But leaving God and Original Sin out of the picture, what would “humility” mean if we stripped away its theistic crust? Is there anything virtuous left? We no longer need to feel humility all the time because we are originally sinful or because we are always under the watchful eye of God. Were there inherently superior beings amongst us, it would be right and just to feel humility in front of them, but among fellow human beings, no such superior people exist.Whatever rightly inspires awe in nature, rightly leaves us feeling humility.⁶ But there is nothing like this in the social or interpersonal realm. From the Enlightenment on, theists and atheists alike have wanted to justify a moral and egalitarian attitude to be shared by all human beings, and this implies a baseline equality among us, a “least common denominator”. Orthogonal to theism, in contemporary times justice, human rights and the inherent dignity of humanity are founded upon the idea that we are all, fundamentally, equally deserving of respect and that no one is inherently superior to anyone else.

Since the early modern period, there have been a few critiques of humility's status as a virtue. Hume (1975) famously dismisses humility as one of the “monkish virtues”, along with celibacy and mortification, among others, while Nietzsche (1989) made it a feature of “slave morality”. A reasonable (though flatfooted) reading of Sidgwick (1907), taken up by Anscombe (1958), has him doubting that humility is a virtue because it requires people to underrate themselves. (James Wardle [1983] later disputes this reading of Sidgwick.) However, a more subtle, incisive, and telling critique comes from Mary Wollstonecraft, from a chapter of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1995) entitled,“Modesty.

[I]n defining modesty, it appears to me equally proper to discriminate that purity of mind, which is the effect of chastity, from a simplicity of character that leads us to form a just opinion of ourselves, equally distant from vanity or presumption, though by no means incompatible with a lofty consciousness of our own dignity. Modesty, in the latter signification of the term, is, that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, and should be distinguished from humility, because humility is a kind of self-abasement.

(p. 207)

We have already noted how the idea of having “a just opinion of ourselves” is best captured by the virtue ofjustice, more so, quite arguably, than modesty (or humility). Importantly, however, Wollstonecraft’s understanding of humility has been taken up by contemporary usage, regard­less of how it is considered by philosophers and theologians.The Oxford English Dictionary first defines it as “The quality of being humble or having a lowly opinion of oneself”, and secondly defines it in terms of “self-abasement”. If we follow common usage, humility is certainly not a virtue.

Turning now to contemporary accounts of humility, there is much to be learned from them. Most of this literature is on intellectual humility, but there seems little reason to think that there should be any significant differences between intellectual and moral humility. The currently dominant view appears to have first been voiced by Norvin Richards (1988), who argues that humility is having a proper perspective on oneself. Nancy Snow (1995, p. 210) defines it as “the disposition to allow the awareness of and concern about [one’s] limitations to have a realistic influence on [one’s] attitudes and behavior”. Allan Hazlett’s (2017) view is that intellectual humility is excellence in attributing to oneself ignorance and other intellectual flaws, failings, or limitations, while Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel Howard-Snyder (2015) jointly defend the claim that intellectual humility is the virtue of owning one’s intel­lectual limitations.

The start of a critique of the OL view begins with a purely analytic point: the greatest worry about the OL view is that it seems to describe half a trait while ignoring the other half. And as soon as we put both halves together, we end up with something that cannot be consid­ered humility any longer. The problem is that accurately knowing one’s limitations also entails accurately knowing one’s strengths and competences. Analytically, there is not one without the other. It certainly does not seem virtuous to own one’s limitations and yet fail at owning one’s strengths. If the glass is half empty, it is apt to acknowledge the emptiness, but it makes no sense to do so without acknowledging the half which is full.We cannot know what we do not do well without being able to distinguish this from what we can do well. But if we put both parts of this self-knowledge together, we no longer have humility. “Trust me, I'm good at this” does not sound very humble.What is the virtue which informs us with an accurate picture of ourselves, including our limitations and our strengths, our weaknesses and our competences? Again, it is not humility but justice.

Try replacing the word “humility” with “justice” in the formulations of the OL view, and one ends up with a smooth and natural read.To take a few examples, first, here is a sentence of Richards with “justice” substituted for “humility”:“Justice doesn’t require that you take no pride at all in what you’ve done, but only that you take less pride than a far greater accomplishment” (1988, p. 255). Next, here are three sentences ofWhitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder, which are meant to show the plausibility of the OL view, substituting “justice” for “intellectual humility”:“Justice increases a person’s propensity to admit his intellectual limitations to himself and others”;“Justice reduces a person’s propensity to blame and explain-away when confront­ing her own intellectual shortcomings”; and “Justice increases a person’s propensity to defer to others who don’t have her intellectual limitations, in situations that call upon those limitations” (2015, pp.

Here, however, is a reductio ad absurdum for the view that humility is a virtue. Following tradi­tion, as well as Martha Nussbaum (1988) and Christine Swanton (2003), let us assume that each virtue has a particular “range” or “field of action” in which it operates. So, for example, courage ranges over all dangerous situations and the courageous thing to do in any dangerous situation is the correct thing to do. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that humility is a virtue and that the OL view of it is correct. Humility therefore ranges over all situations in which owning one's limitations becomes salient, such that the correct thing to do is to act humbly.⁷ Now, consider “Tank Man”, the unidentified man who stood, with food bags in hand, in front of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square on 5 June 1989. Let's assume that the Chinese government intended to instill humility and obedience in the protesters by sending tanks to confront them. Let's also assume that Tank Man already possessed the virtue of humility: he is well-aware of his limita­tions and weaknesses, he defers when apt, tempers his beliefs, etc.

Now, Tank Man finds himself in a situation in which he is (for whatever reason) uniquely well-placed to play a role in the demonstrations by walking in front of the tanks.Tank Man has no reason to think he can stop the tanks which could crush him, but thinks something like the following,“Despite my frailty in the face of this overwhelming force [acknowledging his limita­tions], still, the right thing to do now is speak truth to power”. Let's assume that this was the morally correct and virtuous thing to do. And yet, whatever else was true of his action, there is simply no way to consider Tank Man's stepping in front of the tanks as an action motivated by humility.⁸ It might be heroic, it might be reckless, it might be just or even arrogant, but it surely was not humble.

1. Humility is the virtue which ranges over all circumstances involving the owning of one's limitations. (Call these “L-situations”.)

2. So, in any L-situation, the humble thing to do is the right thing to do.

3. When Chinese tanks confronted the protesters, it was an L-situation for the protesters.

4. The right to do in this L-situation was to block the tanks with one's body.

5. Blocking the path of a tank with only one's body is not being humble.

6. So, when tanks were in Tiananmen Square, the humble thing for Tank Man to have done was to not be humble (from 2 and 5). (Reductio).

The argument gains its purchase because there are times when it is actually wrong to act with genuine humility, even in circumstances which involve owning one's limitations.⁹ Notice that structurally analogous arguments cannot be constructed for, e.g., courage or justice, as there are never situations that fall within the range of these virtues in which one ought not to be courageous or just.Virtues are supposed to always yield correct action: if they did not give this normative assurance, we would have no reason to be investigating them. Situations in which it is morally correct and virtuous to speak truth to power, such as the one Tank Man found him­self within, are those in which people ought not to act with humility. Acting with humility in such situations is a manifestation of having “too much humility”. If we accept that humility can sometimes be a virtue and sometimes not be a virtue, then we cannot rely on it for normative guidance in any particular situation: some other trait or value, besides humility, must inform us as to when humility is morally correct and when it is not. If having humility is not always the right way to be in situations in which we must own our limitations, then it is not humility itself which makes acting with humility sometimes be the virtuous action. Even if we want to say that only “appropriate humility” is virtuous, it is still not humility per se which determines when it is apt, and we need some other criteria to help us determine what to do, such as relying on positive outcomes. But a move such as this amounts to Consequentialism and, in effect, we are no longer treating virtue ethics as its own normative theory.

Would space permit, there are other arguments that question the status of humility as a virtue. One argument concerns the acquisition of virtue and focuses on the differences in how humility is learned compared with other virtues: the basis of humility is found in making mis­takes and failing, as opposed to, e.g., how learning to be courageous is modeled on learning car­pentry (Aristotle, 2000, 1103a30-b2). Another argument looks into the oftentimes unpleasant phenomenology of humility, its relationship with humiliation, and how uncharacteristic such unpleasantness is for virtue. Unfortunately, space does not permit, so this concludes the negative program for why humility is not a virtue.

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