What Is Humility? A Virtue That Is Difficult to Define Without Ruining

Taking humility to be a low estimate of one's own worth runs into immediate difficulties. A person who is genuinely accomplished and believes otherwise holds a false belief, and a virtue requiring falsehood is a strange virtue. Such an account also makes humility unavailable to anyone with accurate self-knowledge of real achievement, which is the wrong result. It conflates the virtue with low self-esteem, which is a psychological state generally regarded as harmful rather than admirable. And it makes the virtue self-undermining, since recognising one's own humility would violate it, producing the familiar joke about a person proud of being humble. Any workable account has to avoid requiring the humble person to be mistaken about themselves.

Several proposals do better and each locates the virtue somewhere other than in self-estimate:

• •Accurate self-assessment, holding that humility is seeing oneself correctly, including one's strengths
• •Low self-focus, holding that the humble person simply attends to themselves less rather than thinking less of themselves
• •Proper perspective, placing one's own importance correctly in relation to others and to whatever one takes to matter
• •Openness to being wrong, which is the intellectual version and is the one with the clearest practical content
• •Not requiring recognition, meaning indifference to whether one's contribution is noticed rather than a belief it was small
• •Owning limitations without being defined by them, which several psychological instruments try to measure

Intellectual humility has received the most attention recently and is the most tractable, since it can be characterised in terms of behaviour rather than inner states. It involves recognising that one's beliefs might be mistaken, taking disagreement as information rather than as threat, revising in the light of evidence and being able to say that one does not know. Those dispositions are measurable, at least approximately, and research reports associations with better calibration, with more accurate assessment of one's own knowledge and with less susceptibility to certain errors. Whether the measurements capture the trait or capture a willingness to describe oneself that way is the standard difficulty with such instruments. What is clearer is that the dispositions themselves are useful whatever they are called, and they can be practised directly by stating what would change one's mind.

Beyond its status as a virtue the disposition has practical consequences that can be stated without moral vocabulary. A person who can be told they are wrong receives correction that others do not, which compounds over time into better information. Teams whose senior members acknowledge uncertainty produce more reporting of problems from junior members, which is documented in aviation and medicine where the consequences of the reverse are measured in lives. Forecasting accuracy improves with willingness to revise. Learning requires admitting ignorance, since a person who cannot say they do not understand does not get the explanation. And negotiation and disagreement go better when neither party has to defend a position to protect their standing. None of that requires the virtue to be admirable, and it is a reason to cultivate the dispositions even for anyone unmoved by the ethical case.

The virtue occupies a central position in several religious traditions and the treatments differ instructively. Christian accounts place it very high, connecting it to a correct understanding of one's position relative to God and treating pride as the fundamental disorder from which others follow. Buddhist accounts connect it to insight about the self, where an accurate understanding undermines the basis for self-importance rather than requiring its suppression. Classical Greek ethics is a partial exception, since Aristotle described a virtue of proper self-regard in which correctly estimating one's own considerable worth is admirable, which reads oddly against later traditions and follows consistently from his general method. Modern secular treatments tend towards the perspective and openness accounts. The common thread across the differences is that all of them locate the virtue in accuracy rather than in underestimation.

Making humility a low self-estimate requires the humble person to be mistaken, excludes anyone with accurate self-knowledge and makes recognising it self-defeating. Better accounts locate it in accurate self-assessment, in attending to oneself less or in openness to being wrong. The intellectual version is the most tractable because it can be characterised behaviourally and practised by stating what would change your mind.