ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the virtue of humility is related to understanding in yet a different way: that it is the purifying absence of a certain kind of misunderstanding, and thus makes way for a humane kind of understanding. The vices of pride are all ways of caring about, claiming or seeking, a kind of personal importance that is an unhealthy and destructive substitute for importance as a person. Evaluative understanding—understanding in which evaluative correctness is necessary for success in understanding—arguably requires right emotion. Since humility is an absence of the vices of pride, the understanding that we must examine first is that involved in these vices. A second vice of pride that turns on agency is the "bullying" vice of domination. Obviously humility can't be a contextless absence; it has to be located—an absence in something. Humility is an absence of the vices of pride in a mature, well-integrated person.
