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"A Monkish Kind of Virtue"? For and Against Humility
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“A Monkish Kind of Virtue”? For and Against Humility
Abstract Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown an increasing interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free society. Yet within this recent “return” to the virtues, one quality that has been almost entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this paper I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. Before making my case for democratic humility as an essential virtue for liberal citizenship under conditions of diffuse pluralism, I first explore some of the problems with humility by tracing its intellectual and moral history within the Jewish and Christian traditions. Next, I explore the “hidden” relationship between humility and pride in order to ask, with Hume and Nietzsche, whether humility is any kind of virtue at all. With this moral and historical terrain established, I offer an account of humility that seeks to address some of the historical difficulties with humility while arguing that the idea of humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important virtues for late-modern societies marked by incommensurable ethical and cultural pluralism.
Key Words: Humility, Virtue, Democracy, Citizenship, Ethics
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“A Monkish Kind of Virtue”? For and Against Humility
Abstract
Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown an
increasing interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free
society. Yet within this recent “return” to the virtues, one quality that has been almost
entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this paper I critically address this lacuna
and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility.
Before making my case for democratic humility as an essential virtue for liberal
citizenship under conditions of diffuse pluralism, I first explore some of the problems
with humility by tracing its intellectual and moral history within the Jewish and Christian
traditions. Next, I explore the “hidden” relationship between humility and pride in order
to ask, with Hume and Nietzsche, whether humility is any kind of virtue at all. With this
moral and historical terrain established, I offer an account of humility that seeks to
address some of the historical difficulties with humility while arguing that the idea of
humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important
virtues for late-modern societies marked by incommensurable ethical and cultural
pluralism.
Key Words: Humility, Virtue, Democracy, Citizenship, Ethics
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