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virtuously predisposed to seek an active understanding and sympathetic regard for his/her
interlocutors. It is on this basis that I think we can say that humility can help facilitate
the meaningful exercise of other liberal virtues, like tolerance, fairness, civility, and
reciprocal reason giving. Democratic humility provides such a condition because it
addresses itself to the one thing that the other liberal virtues must in some sense assume,
but fail to account for in any explicit way: how to listen to one’s fellows.
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As I have
suggested, democratic humility is uniquely positioned to account for this good because
the humble appropriately assume that there is always something they can learn from
others, if only because these “others” are (like themselves) in a constant process of
becoming. In this sense, democratic humility holds both intrinsic and instrumental value:
by giving us an ear for the other, it facilitates personal/moral learning and development,
and by actively bending that ear to others (and especially towards those who are excluded
or marginalized from political power), humility can help secure a sense of recognition,
moral worth, and social and political inclusion for those who remain outside the spheres
of justice and who do not have equal access to the law.
The generosity and open-mindedness that are often taken as hallmarks of liberal
citizenship can be given more effective motivation if, as an ethos of humility would
suggest, intrinsic and instrumental goods can be expected to flow from a more active
mode of attentiveness to others. Whereas virtues like tolerance, civility, and reciprocity
provide necessary qualities for making judgments under conditions of plural and
incommensurable values, civic humility promises to perform some extra moral and
political work whose value we should not underestimate. First, where a cultivated
disposition of civic humility is effectively in play, we are open to the possibility that our
Convention