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that arise between commitments to a diversity of incommensurable fundamental values
and beliefs on the one hand, and the fluid, rapidly changing, and interdependent
conditions of contemporary political life on the other. Democratic humility does not
originate from a concern to meet the dialogic requirements of rational public justification
and liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism. These are important issues, to be
sure, and in what follows I will try to show how democratic humility might be viewed as
a necessary supporting virtue for theories of deliberative democracy or “communicative
ethics.” Yet democratic humility’s normative thrust is, in some ways, more basic, and I
think prior to the question of how the use of political power might be exercised in a
manner that could be endorsed by all reasonable citizens. The goal of an ethos of
democratic humility is nothing more (but also nothing less) than the cultivation of that
disposition or quality of character that can enable citizens of late-modern liberal societies
to reap the fullest moral and political rewards of living under conditions of ethical and
cultural pluralism. In this sense, democratic humility is more closely aligned to cognitive
and political openness than it is to either moral skepticism or private modesty. In what
follows I present humility as a window through which we allow that which is outside of
the self/group to enter in and work upon us, at least for a time. Hence, democratic
humility is less opposed to pride than it is to political and cultural forms of complacency
– those forms of complacency and misdiagnosed accounts of completeness that serve to
close the doors of sense and sensibility to what it is outside or “other” to the
self/group/nation. I will conclude this final section of the essay by showing how
democratic humility can be related to issues of justice and fairness, and how this civic
Convention