If asked to define humility, most of us could rattle off a description easily enough. But we’d likely be talking about a specific branch of that virtue, which scholars call “self-accepting humility.” This variety is about owning your limits, whether they be physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual. Practicing self-accepting humility means acknowledging what you don’t know or how you fall short. One can be self-acceptingly humble when asking a friend for forgiveness, for example, or when hiring an expert to fix your car engine.
But baked into this definition is a quandary: how to practice humility when you actually do know something. Pretending to know less than you do—whether your knowledge comes through education or lived experience or another source—is false humility. And while skepticism has its place, claiming to doubt every firm conviction you’ve ever held is disingenuous.
What to do, then, when someone actually does carry more knowledge, expertise, or lived experience than another? Do they need to pretend otherwise? Is it possible to engage humbly while holding fast to our core beliefs, whether they be religious or political or moral?
Humility researcher and philosopher Brandon Yip thinks it is, and he believes the secret ingredient is something called “magnanimous humility.” Yip coined the term after finding this variety of humility largely absent in research. He argues that this kind of generous, noble humility plays a particularly important role when it comes to deep disagreement.
Take the story of Matthew Stevenson and Derek Black, which Yip cites in his paper. Stevenson, an Orthodox Jew with personal experience of oppression by white nationalists, invited Black—a leader in the white nationalist movement—to a weekly Shabbat dinner in his home. Through these dinners and the conversations they enabled, Black renounced white nationalism and eventually became an advocate for antiracism.
One could say that both parties exercised a form of humility, but of very different stripes. “Black’s humility consisted in recognising his limitations and receiving correction,” Yip writes. Stevenson’s humility, on the other hand, wasn’t the self-accepting kind, where he needed to acknowledge his limits. He didn’t pretend to know less than he did, nor did he forsake his own beliefs. Rather, he set aside his knowledge and lived experience in order to “humb[le] himself in gentle engagement.”
Yip points out that Stevenson was willing to invite Black to his home and join him in conversation, “even though he was entitled to refuse to do either.” This was magnanimity in action.
In this interview, Yip unpacks gaps in humility literature, ideas for practicing magnanimous humility, and why this virtue can help us navigate personal and public disagreement.
First, how would you define magnanimous humility to someone who’s never heard the term?
The easiest way to think about this is in contrast with the usual way we think about humility, where humility is about owning your limits. Magnanimous humility looks similar in terms of its behavioral manifestation; [there’s] a certain kind of meekness involved. But when someone displays magnanimous humility, they’re not actually owning limits. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite, which is that they possess entitlements because they are superior in certain respects, and they choose not to exercise their entitlements. They are willing to lower their status in order to do something with you, to engage with you humbly.
What piqued your interest in this line of scholarship?
As a scholar, I engage with this intellectual stuff all the time. Thinking about intellectual humility is a way of stepping back and asking myself, “What sorts of attitudes and dispositions ought I to take when I engage with other people?”
As I looked at the [humility] literature itself … a lot of it was an emphasis on accepting your limits. And I think that there needs to be a lot more of that than there is right now; I’m not trying to deny the importance of self-accepting humility. But there’s this interesting question: Sure, we need to humble ourselves in order to know things, but after we know something, what room is there for humility left? Thinking about magnanimous humility is important there.
It’s quite natural to think there are certain things that I know. I’m a Christian myself, and it seems odd to me to think that what it means to be intellectually humble is to be skeptical about all my beliefs. But there’s still a question as to how to engage with others across the spectrum when they disagree with me. That’s where magnanimous humility comes in.
What are the implications of pursuing magnanimous humility in public discourse? What about in our personal relationships?
There are two ways of thinking about the utility of the virtue. One way [is] from a first-person point of view. Just because I know things doesn’t mean I have to shut down conversation. I can still be interested: Well, why do you reject what I say so vehemently? What are your motivations? I think to be able to articulate how someone else thinks about an issue, one needs to be magnanimously humble. Otherwise, the other person is not going to listen to you, the other person is not going to engage with you. Magnanimous humility allows a way for you to engage with people who disagree without having to forsake confidence in your beliefs.
I do think that certain aspects of the population, like minorities and oppressed … have a certain epistemic privilege by virtue of their oppression and marginalization. [There’s] a risk that, if they are just self-acceptingly humble, they might give that up. Magnanimous humility can help them say, “I don’t have to forsake my confidence in such beliefs, but I’m willing to engage.”
From a broader political point of view, it’s implausible to think that by telling people to be more careful what they believe in, we’re ever going to get to a position where everyone ends up agreeing—where everyone ends up saying, all right, I guess we don’t know anything after all and we will now start to agree. It seems to me [that] if everyone would just be more willing to elevate one another—the thing at the top is being magnanimously humble, but the end result is that we don’t actually have to resolve disagreements to be able to talk across the political lines.
From a first-person point of view, [magnanimous humility] is a way of respecting our own convictions while being willing to engage across party lines. And from a political point of view, it’s just a more realistic and thoughtful way of thinking about what sorts of democratic virtues you want to cultivate, as opposed to thinking that once everyone’s humble enough they are going to converge on certain issues.
The examples that you point to, like the story of Black and Stevenson, involve really engaged postures of listening—and particularly listening to those who disagree with you. What role does listening play in practicing this virtue?
Listening is really important there, but it’s really being willing to listen to people and hear them on their own terms. I don’t think you have to accept everything they say as a truth, [but] unless you first do the listening, you won’t really be able to get to the other person. You won’t be able to know what their motivations are, how exactly they see things, if you’re too quick to shut them down, or you’re too quick to insist on the points that you rightly or wrongly have learned.
What practical steps could one take when entering a contentious conversation? How would you prepare someone to embody magnanimous humility in their own life?
There’s a quote from [researcher and theorist] Christopher Watkins that I come back to a lot. It says, “Unless we can walk a mile in someone’s shoes and see why the position is not only true, but good and beautiful to them, and until we can explain it in terms that they would be happy to own, then we have not yet come to a point of being able to critique it.”
I think that this is an exercise that you can do in your conversations if you’re disagreeing with someone. As you talk to them, say, “I really want to hear what you’re saying.” And then you try to put what they’re saying [back] to them, and you ask, “Would you accept this? Is this how you’re thinking about this issue?” I don’t mean just like a single sentence, but really being able to explain why their position is true, good, beautiful. Until you can do that, until you can explain it in terms they will be happy to own… I mean, Watkins says you’ve not yet come to a point of being able to critique it.
The good and beautiful part is important, because I think people are drawn to certain ways of thinking about things not just because they’re convinced by the evidence, but because they’re compelled by certain sorts of things. Being able to speak to why they find ideas compelling is really getting to the heart behind why people care about certain issues. It’s not always possible; there are positions that would strike us as crazy. But trying to do that is—not a simple exercise, but a good exercise.
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