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fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify
him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment?”
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Hume’s critical rejection of humility as a moral or social virtue was not unique to
his brand of utilitarianism or to Hume’s penchant to index the good for man by reference
to the useful and agreeable. This can be made plain by briefly noting that Kant also
shares some of Hume’s concerns with the operation of humility in our lives, and seems to
have been influenced by Hume in this particular, echoing Hume’s charge that it is a
“monkish kind of virtue.” For Kant, we are right to be humble before the “holy moral
law,” because in doing so we rightly discover “how remote we are from congruity with
it.”
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But for Kant we should not feel humility in comparison to other human beings
because each of us possesses equal moral worth. As Kant argues, “A low opinion of
one’s person in regard to others is not humility; it betrays, rather, a petty soul and a
servile temperament.” Kant goes on to reject this kind of sham humility in language that
recalls both Hume and some of the earlier Christian writers we have discussed: “Such
imagined virtue, which is merely an analogue of the real thing, is a monkish kind of
virtue, and that is quite unnatural; for the man who so humbles himself towards others is
actually proud thereby.”
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All of this registers important reservations about the nature of
humility. Still, even more penetrating critiques of humility can be found in Machiavelli
and Nietzsche.
In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Machiavelli asks why
“peoples of old were more fond of liberty than they are today.” Machiavelli’s answer
turns to a discussion of Christianity and to the place and significance of humility within
the Christian religion of his time. Comparing the religious beliefs and practices of the
Convention