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receptive to the cultivation and practice of democratic humility, so long as this virtue is
properly regarded as a civic quality that pertains equally to all public agents in a shared
political life. What democratic humility requires, from citizens and leaders alike, is the
recognition that we are all shaped, enabled, but also constrained by our specific (but also
fluid) moral, cultural, and cognitive horizons, even if we cannot specify the nature or the
limits of those horizons in advance.
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When this recognition is brought to bear on public
questions that are ineluctably constrained by the burdens of judgment, humility holds out
both the intrinsic value and motivating promise of deeper forms of understanding and
self-knowledge, and recalls us to the fact that one’s social and moral standing in a
political community radically depend on the reciprocal willingness of others to give your
own claims a serious hearing. As St. Bernard would put it, generosity, compassion, and
mercy, for oneself and for others, depends on a prior condition of humility. We might
translate this for late-modern pluralistic democracies by noting that the political pursuit of
justice and inclusion is a permanent feature of a free and open society. As a
consequence, a society that is perpetually putting itself in question and re-defining the
boundaries of justice and right has an especially strong need for those moral and political
qualities that can enable citizens and leaders to judge and act, within the context of these
contingent realities, with as little presumption and parochialism and as much generosity
and humanity as possible.
When we combine the burdens of political judgment with the recognition of the
incomplete, perspectival, and bounded nature of knowledge/belief, and acknowledge that
political life under conditions of ethical pluralism will place citizens and leaders in
circumstances where hard (often tragic) choices must be made, we have the essential
Convention