Humility

Abstract Humility also pervades the moral life, but in a different way from wisdom. Its function is to protect, purify, and free our loves from the vices of pride: such dispositions as grandiosity, domination, self-righteousness, arrogance, presumption, snobbery, vanity, and pretentiousness. These dispositions seek and cherish, each in its own way, a pseudo-value that I call self-importance. Self-importance, as an object of pursuit, taints, degrades, and diverts our love and pursuit of the good in the various departments hewn out by the virtues of caring such as justice, generosity, compassion, truthfulness, and gratitude. When these concerns are strong, they exclude the pursuit of self-importance, and when the passion for self-importance is strong, it tends to exclude those concerns for the good. Humility, then, is an absence or near-absence of the concern for self-importance from a person’s character.