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Whatever happened to humility? Once held as a cardinal virtue in the ethical life
of the individual, humility seems to have undergone a quiet but steady diminution in
value. While philosophers and political theorists have shown a renewed interest in a
wide range of virtues of late, the idea of humility has not enjoyed any similar renaissance,
nor has it been referenced within the general “return” to the virtues.
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The purpose of this
paper is two-fold: first, to understand why humility has not been included in the list of
liberal-democratic virtues; and secondly, to make a case for a particular form of humility,
what I will call democratic humility. I not only want to add humility to the list of
important liberal-democratic virtues, I also want to argue that democratic humility may
be one of the most important qualities for late-modern societies marked by
incommensurable ethical and cultural pluralism. We need to attend to the virtue of
humility because democratic politics today requires a degree of attentiveness to multiple
forms of difference and an acceptance of contingency and mutability that humility,
properly configured, helps make possible. Yet, in order to see humility as a necessary
quality for democratic citizenship under conditions of value pluralism, it must be
carefully distinguished from the idea of humility as a theistic moral command for beings
of pride. At the same time, the normative recuperation of humility must answer the
multiple charges that it is a “monkish kind of virtue,” a mask for private interest and
political domination, and a quality that is inconsistent with commitments to equal moral
worth, autonomy, and freedom. In this paper I offer an account of humility that seeks to
address these challenges by giving it a different moral and political register, one that is
more public and political than private, and one that is more active and relational than
internal and correctional.
Convention