“Being judgmental” gets a lot of flak, since it potentially conflicts with a natural human desire for approval. And yet, humans cannot exist without judgment. Whether distinguishing between food and poison, or evaluating tradeoffs between skills, tastes, and needs in possible careers, no sphere of human life can escape judgment. The person who claims not to be judgmental is either dishonest or suicidal.
To live well, we must not only accept the responsibility for making judgments, but making the correct judgments. We have a very real interest in being right: if we do not accurately discern truth, or select the correct values, our happiness, welfare, and even our very lives are compromised as surely as doing nothing. If we take that idea seriously, we cannot take for granted that we actually are correct. In other words, we need the virtue of humility.
Most people have a working definition of humility as modesty, or even meekness. Accordingly, humility is often thought of as refraining from judgment, or at the very least diminishing one’s own judgment. Along these lines, Ayn Rand held humility to be one of the great vices, famously describing it as both moral equivocation and self-abnegation and therefore standing in direct opposition to the achievement of both virtues and values. This is a grave mistake, on both sides: humility is better thought of as the objective recognition of both our abilities and our limitations, and a close relative of the virtue of honesty.
Indeed, humility is implicitly at the core of the entire system of virtue ethics. Human flourishing depends on our acting in conformity with reality, but our fallibility ensures that we are likely to be mistaken in some of our beliefs. Even in an impossible hypothetical situation wherein our apprehension of the world is nearly perfect and we hold all the values that truly best promote our welfare and happiness, we are nevertheless almost assuredly incorrect in our beliefs about what actions best achieve those values. Unlike other systems, virtue ethics embraces the metaphysical propositions of both objective reality and human fallibility; rather than arrogantly attempting grossly underinformed ethical calculus, as in Utilitarianism, or omitting context, as in Deontology, or rejecting a uniform code of ethics entirely, as in Nihilism, Virtue-ethical systems instead attempt to acausally relate modes of action and desirable outcomes to help coordinate difficult decision-theoretic problems. Virtue ethics does not posit that a given action will achieve a certain end, but rather that a set of dispositions will tend toward a set of desirable ends, especially if those dispositions are widely shared among a society. Rather than rigid rules that pretend the good life can be achieved by adhering to an unthinking, immutable program – or alternatively, that humans are capable of thriving without any kind of moral standard – it lays out principles and standards by which individuals’ character can be assessed. This approach is a natural consequence of those two metaphysical propositions, making humility inextricably bound to the broader system.
Humility is acknowledging that we are all fallen creatures – not in the sense that we bear Original Sin, but in the sense that we, at best, striving (toward virtue, knowledge, etc.) – and acting accordingly. It does not consist in refraining from judgment, which would be moral abdication, but in avoiding being presumptuous – whether about facts of reality, or individuals’ circumstances, experience, values, and character (including oneself!). To help concretize this, we can partition humility loosely into “social” and “intellectual” components; that is, how we judge people, and how we judge ideas.
In terms of our social interactions and judgment of others, humility means recognizing that every person has his own context and blind spots. Consequently, humility demands that we be generous in our estimations of others. In Arthur Forman’s words, “Not everyone thinks the way you think, knows the things you know, believes the things you believe, nor acts the way you would act.” Therefore, we should not ascribe faults to others where we would make excuses for ourselves. Some examples:
- “He’s rude,” while “I was tired, hungry, and stressed.”
- “He’s irrational,” while “I made the best decision possible with poor information.”
- “He’s a bad driver,” while “That car was in my blind spot.”
Obviously, a demonstrated pattern of behavior does reveal character: some people really are rude, irrational, and terrible drivers to boot. Sometimes they even seem to go out of their way to prove it to us. But individual actions do not reveal character. In the same way that a garden may be beautiful despite having a lone weed, our character is defined by the composite of our actions: we are what we repeatedly do. Rather than jumping to conclusions, we should appreciate that we can judge others imperfectly at best. In general, we have only a small amount of knowledge about other people; while that context can be useful in forming a tentative opinion of someone, we need to recognize that we lack the complete context. What’s more, we ought to presume positive intentions: most people are trying to do the best they can, even if they routinely fall short. In Ian Maclaren’s words, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Similarly, while we may have a good understanding of ourselves (which is clearly not always the case), our experience is such that we may not be able to fit that knowledge of ourselves into the broader context. If there is anything of value in the now-common catchphrase “check your privilege” – and its users seem to be trying quite hard to disabuse disinterested parties of the notion that there is – it would be this: we cannot take anyone’s position for granted, including our own.
More generally, engaging seriously with the metaphysical limitation of fallibility means refraining from unnecessarily strong responses and pronouncements, while apprehending our surroundings in an open-minded way – or at the very least, a vaguely tolerant one.
Again, this is not to say that we should refrain from judgment – tolerance is not permissiveness – but rather that we be discriminating in our judgments. Our judgments need to be commensurate with our experience, and tempered by the awareness that every observation comes with significant measurement error. And that means we need to entertain seriously the possibility that our beliefs and values are wrong, even to the point of actively seeking out instances where we’re wrong.
In terms of our beliefs, intellectual humility means taking ideas seriously, respecting them enough to understand their natures, origins, bases, and consequences. We need to acknowledge the possibility that we ourselves are wrong, ill-informed, incapable, etc. This implies constantly checking and rechecking one’s premises and conclusions in light of possible alternatives and additional information, even – especially! – for our most firmly held beliefs. (A good rule of thumb here: if it’s non-falsifiable, it’s probably false, and definitely not knowledge.)
In short, humility means embracing as a virtue a hypersensitivity to methodological reasoning, biases/heuristics, and uncertainty that might less charitably be called epistemic paranoia. The consequences of error are serious enough that we need to be vigilant of our errors, and since we cannot easily distinguish truth and error, we must treat each belief as potentially incorrect, even if we can be reasonably confident we are correct about most things.
As an analogy, when satellites are put into orbit, they’re launched with a set of batteries to sustain them through periods where they may not have access to solar energy. However, weight being a concern, the number of batteries is minimized – and this means that the failure of any one battery is catastrophic to the mission. Compounding the problem, the batteries cannot be loaded with electrolyte until the launch, meaning the flight batteries cannot be tested. What’s a bloated military-industrial complex to do? It turns out that each lot contains an excess of batteries; this excess is sampled, and if a single battery in the sample fails, the entire lot is scrapped, even when it is known that the lot was overwhelmingly functional. That is the standard to aspire to in our beliefs – and we don’t get to pass the test of our ideas by lowering our standards.
As a personal matter, this entails periodically asking oneself not just “What do I believe?” but also “Why do I believe it?” – and abandoning any belief which is not backed by decisive evidence, while leaving open strongly-supported beliefs as merely tentative conclusions. This level of scrutiny extends not only to one’s perception of one’s surroundings, but also one’s own values, recognizing that nothing we profess to be knowledge – i.e. justified true belief – can be taken for granted, because the underlying justifications for it are always incomplete (and, unfortunately, chronically susceptible to our own inherent tendency toward irrationality). We need to be focused on the methods of proper thought: overcoming known cognitive biases, seeking new information, and scrutinizing our own beliefs, updating them in the face of new information. In other words, we need to emulate the folks at Less Wrong.
As a matter of intellectual debate, all this means giving one’s opponents the strongest possible position. This means interpreting the other person according to their understanding of language, their experience, and their context, in addition to our own. It means being able to pass the Ideological Turing Test – stating the other persons’ view so well that they would agree in full – and then reflecting on that position before attempting to rebut it. Along with this, we ought to provide the benefit of every doubt to rhetorical missteps. Furthermore, we ought to recognize that most people are not significantly more or less rational than ourselves. Rather than jumping to conclusions, we should actively try to imagine a context wherein a person’s behavior or beliefs make sense. More often than not, “there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.”
On a related note, intellectual humility also requires vigilance against the so-called “weak man” argument. Whereas a straw man is a deliberate, gross mischaracterization of an opponent’s position that can be easily “refuted”, a weak man is a genuine, but terrible argument, professed by only a slim number of unrepresentative advocates of a particular position, and brought to prominence by one’s own side of the argument. Rhetorically, the power of weak man arguments comes from the fact that they effectively re-center people’s beliefs, and that they cannot be dismissed as unreal, because some people do genuinely adhere to them.
While observation of such weak men can sometimes be useful to anticipate slippery slopes with no Schelling Fences, the more likely consequence of entertaining arguments involving them is simple ideological inoculation: when we are exposed to a weak argument, just as with a weak virus, we become more resistant to stronger variants. And susceptibility does us a great disservice, because it means we ignore the most powerful arguments on the other side of an issue – the ones that are most capable of demonstrating our own errors. It is much easier to write off religion after watching the Westboro Baptist Church than after reading the Summa Theologica. Whether we employ weak men, or permit them to be employed against us, we lower the bar for our beliefs – either becoming artificially more persuasive through cognitive loopholes, or more resistant to powerful counterarguments against us. Neither is desirable if we value truth.
Incidentally, these are not merely suggestions for developing one’s character – they are also remarkably effective persuasive techniques. To combat an argument, one must first understand it in its own terms, rather than one’s own projections and distortions of it. It is impossible to convince someone they are wrong if one is not objecting to their argument, but only one’s mistaken version of it. Moreover, one should remember that the purpose of any argument is not to win, but to find something closer to truth; characterizing the opposition at its best is the approach most likely to lead to a change or refinement of one’s own thinking.