Intellectual Humility and the Ends of the Virtues: Conflicting Aretaic Desiderata

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that disagreement about how to characterize intellectual humility masks deeper disagreement about the ends the intellectual virtues are meant to serve. This has been largely unacknowledged in discussions of intellectual humility, and of the intellectual virtues generally. Despite disclaimers, contestants often proceed as though there is an available unified account of the virtue that, with enough persuasion, all could be brought to accept. This essay contends a shared account is unlikely and therefore such persuasive efforts miss the point. What is needed, rather, is more attention to the kinds of desiderata that are being privileged in the various accounts: what are the conceptions of human nature and human flourishing driving different accounts? I use a simple method to make my case. I begin with the two best contemporary efforts to characterize intellectual humility. I show why each side's attempts to persuade the other are likely to fail. I then show that even if some unified account of intellectual humility could be cobbled together from these two proposals, it could not capture at least one historically influential account of intellectual humility, one found in the writings of Augustine. In a concluding section, I offer an interpretation of why the project of finding a shared account of intellectual humility seems sure to fail. I argue that liberal political commitments drive much of the contemporary discussion of the intellectual virtues, and the extent to which agreement seems attainable is correlative to the extent we are willing to allow liberalism to determine the desiderata for an account of the virtues.

KEYWORDS:

• intellectual humility
• virtue
• Augustine

Acknowledgements

This essay benefited from two research fellowships made possible by the John Templeton Foundation, one at St. Louis University and the other at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation, St. Louis University, or Biola’s Center for Christian Thought. I am grateful to Stephen Bush, Nathan Carson, Rebecca DeYoung, Stephen Pardue, Steve Porter, Bob Roberts, Kevin Timpe, and Jay Wood for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1 MacIntyre, After Virtue.

2 Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians among the Virtues, xii.

3 I am thinking, for instance, of Leithart, Grattitude.

4 For one of the original, and still most influential, efforts to use the category of virtue to construct a new theory of knowledge, see Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind.

5 Driver, “The Virtues of Ignorance.”

6 Richards, “Is Humility a Virtue?”; Flanagan “Virtue and Ignorance.”

7 Hazlett, “Higher-Order Epistemic Attitutdes”; Samuelson et al., “The Science of Intellectual Humility.”

8 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues. Along with low concern, RW include in their “fair approximation of the virtue” of IH two further components: an absence of intellectual domination (an inordinate concern to have power or influence over others’ intellectual lives) and an absence of intellectual arrogance (a tendency to inappropriately infer intellectual entitlements on the basis of one's intellectual excellences). Most commentators have focused on the low concern component, for good reason. RW give it the most attention, but also, low concern seems predictive of non-domination and non-arrogance whereas the reverse predictions seem less secure. Low concern thus seems more fundamental to RW's account of IH than the other two components.

9 Whitcomb et al. “Intellectual Humility.”

10 Whitcomb et al. “Intellectual Humility,” 7–8.

11 WBBH-S could sharpen the objection by stipulating that Professor P is not only oblivious to his limitations but is disposed to be oblivious. But, again, such a disposition could be connected to factors which, from the perspective of Low Concern, are irrelevant to IH.

12 Whitcomb et al. “Intellectual Humility,” 8.

13 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 250, emphasis added.

14 Ibid., 237–238, emphasis added.

15 Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility,” 3.

16 Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility,” 18.

17 Note that those who experience the imposter phenomenon need not be overemphasizing their limitations. They need not be self-deprecating or servile. They may have a clear-headed sense of their limitations and how relatively significant they are. Nevertheless, in the relevant social settings, their awareness of limitations becomes paralyzing simply because they are so concerned about their intellectual status.

18 Questions about trait prediction are obviously empirical. I am told by Pete Hill, one of the principle investigators of a “psychology of IH” research project, that no studies to date have tracked the correlation between low concern and limitations-owning, but he is hopeful such studies are underway.

19 Augustine, Confessions, 3.8.16.

20 Ibid., 1.18.24.

21 Ibid., 5.7.12, emphasis added.

22 Ibid., 1.9.14.

23 Ibid., 1.9.15

24 Ibid., 6.5.8.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 7.9.14.

27 Ibid., 3.5.9–10.

28 Ibid., 8.8.19.

29 The distinction between discovering their inferiority to God and giving themselves to God is the distinction I am suggesting between owning limitations and accepting limitations. See Pardue, The Mind of Christ for a theological interpretation of IH that uses the language of limitations but emphasizes the “embrace” of such limitations in a way that mirrors the kind of dependence relation we find in Augustine.

30 Augustine, Confessions, 5.3.4–5.

31 Ibid., 4.15.26.

32 Ibid., 8.10.22.

33 Ibid., 7.21.27.

34 Ibid., 4.16.30.

35 Ibid., 11.2.3.

36 It is because they were convinced of the irreducibly theological character of humility that critics of classical Christian morality like Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche all sought to exclude humility (what Hume called “that monkish virtue”) from the list of the virtues. It is striking how few contemporary secular philosophers share such reticence about the translatability of humility into a secular register. Taylor, Ethics, Faith and Reason, is the only one I find pressing the concern that humility as a virtue cannot be maintained divorced from the religious contexts that originated the virtue.

37 Whitcomb et al., “Intellectual Humility,” 8.

38 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 251.

39 Ibid., 251–252.

40 At stake here is the distinction between the moral and intellectual virtues. I think WBBH-S are willing to make a stronger demarcation between the two than RW (although I do not think WBBH-S's position commits them to a rigid distinction between the two). WBBH-S think intellectual flourishing can be separated out from overall flourishing in a way I think RW would (rightly) resist.

41 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 23.

42 For Augustine, IH is not sufficient for intellectual flourishing because one may possess IH yet be intellectually apathetic. IH must be combined with a love of knowledge. The virtue such a combination names is studiositas. Love of knowledge combined with intellectual pride produces curiositas.

43 Hauerwas and Pinches, Christmas among the Virtues, xi.

44 Augustine, The City of God, 19.25.

45 Ibid., 5.12–13.

46 Ibid., 5.12.

47 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 2.13.

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Notes on contributors

Kent Dunnington

Kent Dunnington is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Biola University.