Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue (review)

In Kant and the Ethics of Humility, Jeanine Grenberg proposes to rehabilitate the virtue of humility. As she states in her introduction: "Humility is a curious virtue with a checkered history." Humility, Grenberg notes, has suffered from both a lack of definitional clarity and a sustained attack on its status as a virtue. Why then even attempt a rehabilitation? And why attempt to rescue humility within the context of Kantian ethical theory, a theory that is generally viewed as virtue-light?

The history of the virtue of humility is not an encouragement to this project of rehabilitation. Humility is a self-regarding state that stems from a valuation of the self against some external standard. The standards within religious traditions against which the self is to be measured have been divine or transcendent models of purity or (within secular traditions) social competitive models of comparison. As a consequence of such evaluations, humility has been associated with attitudes of meekness, inferiority, and even self-contempt. Such devaluations do not comport well with the emphasis on human equality characteristic of modern liberal ethical traditions, and they most certainly do not comport well with the Kantian notion of human dignity. Should not a Kantian then simply reject the whole tradition of humility as a virtue?

Grenberg maintains quite the opposite position. She argues that the Kantian notion of human dignity requires the virtue of humility to find its proper bearings. Humility is then a prerequisite for the fulfillment of the entire range of duty, including our duties to others. Arguing that our natural and legitimate desire for happiness makes us vulnerable and dependent, Grenberg demonstrates how this dependence can corrupt and destabilize self-love through the internal conflict generated by the demands of the moral law. Without a proper measure of the value of the self provided by the commitment to the moral law, the individual is "primed" by this internal conflict to over-assert her rights in the competitive contexts that characterize our social condition. If one accepts that, within the Kantian corpus, self-love is the source of moral corruption, then whatever checks improper or undue self-love will also support moral development or the development of virtue in its various manifestations.

What can serve as this "check" on our innate propensity to self-love? Arguing that moral principles are neither transcendent nor derived from competitive social models, Grenberg demonstrates the internal consistency and connection of commitment to moral principle with humility understood as the achievement of the internal condition of proper valuation of the self in relation to duty. This internalized disposition is both the expression of a moral maxim and a settled character trait or virtue. In constructing her argument, Grenberg stresses the stabilizing function of the acceptance of the shared limitations and capacities that humans possess with respect to the development of virtue. Reviewing and rejecting a wide range of alternative conceptions of humility, Grenberg argues that the acceptance of a philosophical anthropology of shared limitations and capacities as a context for ethics makes possible the rehabilitation of humility because it supports our assessments of the equal moral worth of persons and does not force destabilizing models onto the evaluation of the self. Furthermore, duties to self derived from the proper measure of the value of the self generate a model for our recognition of our duties to others without generating the self-absorption that communitarian critics of Kantian ethics claim to be inevitable.

In this "Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue," as told by Grenberg, humility provides a meta-attitude or focal point for the development of the other virtues and thus a basis for the unity of the virtues. Humility, then, is no debilitating condition, but the close cousin of proper self-esteem. This is not an easy association to buy on the surface, but Grenberg has made a painstaking and plausible argument for a Kantian rehabilitation...