Michael Brady (Glasgow) will give a talk on “Humility and Pride”.

Abstract: Humility is held to be more valuable, more morally praiseworthy, than pride. Some make this point in terms of virtues – that humility counts as virtuous, whilst pride, if not a vice, fails to be a virtue. This raises a puzzle, however. For there are considerable similarities between pride and humility. Given this, those who think humility is virtuous whilst pride is not are faced with a problem – namely, the problem of explaining this difference in our aretaic rankings of them, by appealing to some other feature or condition that suffices to distinguish the two. In this paper, I’ll argue that a number of recent attempts to explain what humility is, and in so doing explain why humility is virtuous, fail on this account. In the final section, I’ll suggest that a more plausible solution can be found if we locate the relevant difference in how humility and pride are expressed, and in the different demands they make of us.

The seminar will happen in Zoom. If you are not in our Zoom group, please let me (si24@) know and I can add you. You can download Zoom and make an account here www.zoom.us . Tell me the e-mail address that you used to make an account and I can add you to the group.