Moral Psychology by Unknown

Moral Psychology by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-04-28T00:00:00+00:00


Thomas Nadelhoffer and Jennifer Cole Wright

Although humility is often equated in people’s minds with low self-regard and tends to activate images of the stoop-shouldered, self-deprecating, weak-willed soul only too willing to yield to the wishes of others, in reality humility is the antithesis of this caricature.

—Robert A. Emmons (1998, p. 33)

Humility is one of the strangest of the traditional virtues. On the one hand, it is associated with positive traits—being down-to-earth, keeping one’s accomplishments in proper perspective, being less self-occupied, and displaying a willingness to help (and forgive) others. On the other hand, it has been associated with traits such as low-mindedness, self-abasement, self-denigration, and even self-loathing.

For these and related reasons, philosophers and psychologists have found humility puzzling and problematic. It is one thing to insist that humility requires us to understand our proper place and to focus more on others than we focus on ourselves. It is another thing altogether to insist that we view ourselves as inherently corrupted, vile, and wretched—as some prominent theologians have suggested. Given the more extreme conceptions of humility, it is no wonder that many philosophers have dismissed humility. Nor should we be surprised by how little it has been empirically studied.

But before we pass judgment on humility (whether positive or negative), we must first decide what we take it to be (and not to be). Whether we follow St. Thomas Aquinas (1274/1972) and others in defining humility as “self-abasement to the lowest place” (Summa Theologiae [ST], II-II, Q. 161, Art. 1, ad. 2) or instead define it more innocuously as the capacity to keep one’s accomplishments and self-worth in perspective, this initial definition will influence what we conclude about the nature and value of humility. This problem is not just a tempest in a philosophical teapot—it is critical to the empirical study of humility as well.

Our first goal in this paper is to briefly explore (in the section “The Philosophy of Humility”), the most prominent and influential view of humility put forward by theologians and philosophers and highlight the shortcomings and limitations of this view. Next (in the section “The Psychology of Humility”), we turn our attention to the psychological literature on humility. Psychologists (like the philosophers and theologians before them) have been challenged by their disagreement about what humility is—and how it is best operationalized. They have also faced the challenge of measurement. Given the nature of humility, you can’t ask people whether they are humble without raising worries about expectancy, social desirability, and self-enhancement. This problem has prompted one prominent researcher to conclude that “by its very nature, the construct of humility poses some special challenges to researchers” (Tangney, 2000, p. 75) and that humility “may represent one of those relatively rare personality constructs that is simply unamenable to self-report methods” (Tangney, 2000, p. 78).

While these concerns about humility must be taken seriously, we think there is nonetheless a philosophically respectable and empirically tractable model of humility worth considering. By way of explanation, we will present our account (in the section



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