Philosophers often claim that humility is a dependent virtue: a virtue that depends on another virtue for its value. I consider three views about this relation: Specific Dependence, Unspecific Dependence, and Fittingness. I argue that, since humility cannot uniquely depend on another virtue, and since this uniqueness is desirable, we should reject Specific and Unspecific Dependence. I defend a Fittingness view, according to which the humble person possesses some objectively good quality fitting for humility. I show beyond Slote’s original characterization (...) of the dependence relation that, even if humility’s value depends on having objectively good qualities, humility itself can be one such quality. So, humility can depend on itself. I call this view Bootstrapped Fittingness. (shrink)

I argue for an egalitarian conception of modesty. Modesty is a virtue because an apt expression of what is, and is not, morally salient in our attitudes toward persons and is important because we are prone to arrogance, self‐importance, and hero worship. To make my case, I consider 3 claims which have shaped recent discussions: first, that modesty is valuable because it obviates destructive social rankings; second, that modesty essentially involves an indifference to how others evaluate one's accomplishments; and third, (...) the wide spread but normatively fraught assumption that the modest person is deserving of credit. Although the first two features identify something significant about modesty, they fail to ground it. I argue that appeals to deserved credit bear a larger explanatory burden than has been supposed; they can smuggle in the illegitimate social hierarchies that modesty is supposed to counter. I make my case for modesty as an excellence in moral perspective by arguing that prominent, nonegalitarian, accounts of modesty allow for or promote illegitimate forms of social privilege. Modesty is valuable because it expresses a commitment to fair distribution of basic moral recognition and a skillful response to unjust social hierarchies at odds with this fair distribution. (shrink)

Honesty is widely accepted as a prime example of a moral virtue. And yet, honesty has been surprisingly neglected in the recent drive to account for specific virtuous traits. This paper provides a framework for an increased focus on honesty by proposing success criteria that will need to be met by any plausible account of honesty. It then proposes a motivational account on which honesty centrally involves a deep motivation to avoid deception. It argues that this account satisfies the required (...) success criteria and discusses why (and when) honesty can be accepted as a moral virtue. Finally, it highlights some implications of accepting a motivational account of honesty for future work on encouraging the development of honesty, and on the relationship between different types of virtue. (shrink)

One of the most pressing challenges facing virtue theorists is the conflation problem. This problem concerns the difficulty of explaining the distinction between different types of virtue, such as the distinction between moral virtues and intellectual virtues. Julia Driver has argued that only an outcomes-based understanding of virtue can provide an adequate solution to the conflation problem. In this paper, I argue against Driver’s outcomes-based account, and propose an alternative motivations-based solution. According to this proposal, intellectual virtues can be identified (...) by the shared motivation for cognitive contact with reality, while moral virtues are identified by appeal to the characteristic motivations of kindness and justice. I defend the proposal by demonstrating that it produces plausible verdicts concerning the virtue status of candidate moral and intellectual virtues. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a new insight on the virtue of modesty. It argues that modesty is best understood as an executive virtue with the moderate evaluative attitude at its center. The main goals are to describe the main features of this evaluative attitude and to distinguish it from other features that are only contingently associated with modesty. Then some distinctive features of modesty as an executive virtue are suggested and defended. Next, some of existing accounts are critically examined. (...) Finally, this paper ends with the claim that modesty as a virtue does not depend on possession of excellent qualities. (shrink)

Philosophers who have written on modesty have largely agreed that it is a virtue, and that it therefore has an important psychological component. Mere modest behavior, it is often argued, is actually false modesty if it is generated by the wrong kind of mental state. The philosophical debate about modesty has largely focused on the question of which kind of mental state—cognitive, motivational, or evaluative—best captures the virtue of modesty. We therefore conducted a series of experiments to see which philosophical (...) account matches the folk concept of modesty. Surprisingly, we found that the folk concept is primarily behavioral. This leads us to argue that modesty may not be a virtue, but that if it is none of the extant philosophical accounts have properly explained why. (shrink)

The trait of modesty has received significant philosophical attention in recent years. This is due, in part, to Julia Driver's claim that modesty is able to act as a counter-example to intellectualist accounts of the nature of virtue. In this paper I engage with the debate about the nature of modesty by proposing a new account. ‘Modesty as kindness’ states that the trait of modesty ought to be considered as intimately connected with the more fundamental virtue of kindness. I set (...) out the account, explain its benefits and defend it against possible objections. I then ask whether or not the intense focus on the trait of modesty has actually furthered our understanding of the nature of virtue more generally, and suggest that alternative approaches ought to be considered. (shrink)

Philosophers often characterize modesty as a disposition that primarily or exclusively involves individual attitudes about one’s worth in relation to others. Borrowing from William James, I offer an interpersonal view of modesty that requires an emotional disposition sensitive to causing others offense based upon one’s self-presentation. On this view, modesty is a trait with the following three necessary features: (1) the modest person, A, endorses a norm of self-presentation M, (2) A is justified in believing that another person, B, endorses (...) M, and (3) A is emotionally disposed to avoid offending B by violating M. These conditions account for the variety of modesty norms about one’s merits and achievements, personal objects, and traditional modesty norms in dress and self-presentation. (shrink)

This article discusses conceptions of modesty and humility and their key features. It gives a brief historical overview of debates about whether or not they’re really virtues at all. It also discusses theories of modesty and humility that root them in the presence or absence of particular beliefs, emotions, desires, and attention. it also discusses related phenomena in epistemology: rational limits on self-ascription of error, attitudes to disagreement, and openness to alternative views.

I argue for an egalitarian conception of modesty. Modesty is a virtue because an apt expression of what is, and is not, morally salient in our attitudes toward persons and is important because we are prone to arrogance, self-importance, and hero worship. To make my case, I consider 3 claims which have shaped recent discussions: first, that modesty is valuable because it obviates destructive social rankings; second, that modesty essentially involves an indifference to how others evaluate one's accomplishments; and third, (...) the widespread but normatively fraught assumption that the modest person is deserving of credit. Although the first 2 features identify something significant about modesty, they fail to ground it. I argue that appeals to deserved credit bear a larger explanatory burden than has been supposed; they can smuggle in the illegitimate social hierarchies that modesty is supposed to counter. I make my case for modesty as an excellence in moral perspective by arguing that prominent, nonegalitarian, accounts of modesty allow for or promote illegitimate forms of social privilege. Modesty is valuable because it expresses a commitment to fair distribution of basic moral recognition and a skillful response to unjust social hierarchies at odds with this fair distribution. (shrink)

In a 1984 interview, Michel Foucault introduced a distinction between two forms of freedom: freedom as the ontological condition of ethics, and ethics as the “practice of freedom” informed by reflection. This text suggests that a good understanding of Foucault’s thoughts on freedom would require accounts of both ontological freedom and practices of freedom, but the secondary literature currently suffers from a shortage of work on these topics. This thesis attempts to fill this gap in the literature by offering a (...) new account of practices of freedom which also shows the connection with ontological freedom. Drawing inspiration from the constitutivist approach to meta-ethics, I suggest that Foucault’s notion of the practice of freedom is best understood by identifying the “constitutive aims” of the practice, in other words, the aims that make an agent’s activity a practice of freedom. Such a framework allows us to understand how Foucault can make specific ethical suggestions without committing himself to substantive moral claims and also allows us to apply the notion of practices of freedom to a broad range of real-life examples. I first offer a new account of ontological freedom and then, using a constitutivist approach, engage in a close reading of Foucault’s work in order to identify the constitutive aim of practices of freedom. With the aims in view, I demonstrate what it means to successfully practice freedom and then apply the account in two close readings of historical individuals. The first, on Socrates as presented in the Platonic dialogues, shows that we can apply our account of the practice of freedom to existing individuals. The second, on Oscar Wilde, argues that Wilde’s experience of agency in the practice of freedom was middle-voiced, rather than active, and thereby allows us to loosen the assumed connection between practices of freedom and active agency. (shrink)

Humility and modesty are both emphasized in Eastern and Western societies. However, people usually conflate them in everyday usage. To reduce the confusion of the two constructs, it is very vital to carefully differentiate the two constructs and examine whether they lead to similar or different effects on job performance. In this study, we scrutinized the effects of the two constructs on four dimensions of job performance simultaneously, including task performance, citizenship behavior, unethical pro-organizational behavior, and innovative behavior. Using a (...) dataset of 239 employees and 77 supervisors, we showed that modesty is not related to task performance and voicing, but that it is positively related to unethical pro-organizational behavior and negatively related to helping and innovative behavior. In contrast, we showed that humility is negatively related to unethical pro-organizational behavior and positively related to task performance, helping, voicing, and innovative behavior. Our findings reveal that modesty and humility can lead to very divergent work outcomes. The results strongly support the idea that modesty and humility are distinct constructs embedded in separate nomological networks and strongly suggest that organizations should encourage employees’ humility rather than modesty. The theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed. (shrink)