In brief, my argument is that there are valuable features of close
friendship which risk being jeopardised in friendships between members of privileged
groups and members of marginalised groups. This is due to the privileged having
epistemic limitations - chiefly, ignorance and bias, that can too easily go unaddressed.
By allowing the privileged to ‘own’ these limitations, intellectual humility can help
preserve these goods and promote these friendships.
But what is humility? And what kind of humility would best serve these ends? My
argument focuses on ‘epistemic’ or ‘intellectual’ humility (I use these terms
interchangeably): humility about what we can know, humility regarding (among other
things) our epistemic limitations. Further, it is conceived of as an epistemic virtue: a trait
of character that makes us better as knowers and, often, more likely to get at the truth.
Privileged people failing to empathise with or take seriously the experiences of
marginalised people can be all too common. Attempting to do this successfully can also
present distinctively epistemic challenges. Often, it can confront us with the limits of
what we know and how we enquire.
To this end, this thesis attempts to give an account of the virtue of intellectual humility.
The first chapter surveys existing, prominent accounts of the virtue. Here, I argue that,
while each hits on something intuitively right about the humble person’s character or
behaviour, each account alone is inadequate. As we see, each is vulnerable to counterexamples, inherits an explanatory burden regarding the features of intellectual humility
that it does not regard as defining, and makes implausible empirical assumptions. This,
I argue, is a symptom of the standard methodology, employed by (almost) all the
accounts discussed. That is, to define the virtue in terms of a single feature, that is
necessary and sufficient for the possession of the virtue. This approach, I argue, is
flawed.
With this in mind, Chapter Two considers not just alternative views, but alternative
methodologies: different ways of going about giving an account of the virtue. Here, I
argue in favour of a family resemblance account. I develop this view in some detail,
suggesting it has numerous advantages over the standard methodology. However, I
briefly consider Taneini’s account (which defines the virtue in terms of two features,
thereby departing from the standard methodology).
What is crucial for my purposes, I suggest, is that limitations-owning, as defined by
Whitcomb et al. (2017), is highly likely to be intimately involved in intellectual humility on
any of the accounts I consider. This is because it will either be a defining feature or have
a close causal relationship to any of the other purported features of intellectual humility,
according to the alternative views. And we can make good sense of this on the family
resemblance account, as well as, perhaps, on Tanesini’s Attitudinal Account. With this in
mind, I proceed on firm ground in taking limitations-owning as the trait of primary
concern in the rest of the thesis.
This thesis is specifically concerned with how the epistemic limitations of privileged
people can undermine their friendships with people who are oppressed. I believe there
are many good reasons we should care about this. As I argue in chapters Three and
Four, close friendship provides a number of important goods. Close friends value one
another in themselves, including valuing those features that might be socially
stigmatised, they promote one another’s self-esteem, create the conditions for
comfortable, mutual self-disclosure, and receive and provide significant emotional
support.
Each of these are important in their own right; but they are especially valuable when we
consider friendships between members of different social groups, particularly where one
friend’s identity privileges them in some important respect, while the other’s causes
them to be subject to oppression. When these friendships go well, they can counteract a
number of social, epistemic and moral ills within society. They can be edifying to the
privileged person and help restore self-esteem to the marginalised person, who too
often will have had this undermined by oppressive conditions. Unfortunately, when
these friendships go badly, they can reinforce the marginalised person’s subordinate
position, and squander the opportunities of the privileged person to morally and
epistemically develop.
Thus, while Chapter Five considers some initial objections to the overall argument of the
thesis, Chapter Six considers some major respects in which the epistemic limitations of
the privileged person may show up in relationship with a friend of a marginalised
background. As I suggest, these are ignorance and bias. The limited epistemic standpoint of the privileged can mean they do not need to know about the oppressive day-to-day reality experienced by the marginalised person. Society-wide prejudices and
stereotypes can also inculcate in them biases towards the social group to which their
friend belongs. This will be all the more likely when the group is oppressed and the
other’s privilege has limited their opportunities for authentic engagement with members
of that group. Together, these can motivate the perpetration of a number of epistemic
injustices by the privileged friend towards the marginalised friend.
As I argue, this is distinctively bad in friendship. It undermines some of the goods of
friendship I discuss in Chapters Three and Four: creating conditions of self-disclosure;
the promotion of the friend’s self-esteem, including their epistemic self-confidence; and
the ability to provide the friend with emotional support. Thus, we have particular reasons
to worry about the consequences of these epistemic limitations in the context of close
friendship.
Chapter Seven looks to epistemic humility as a remedy. If these problems are caused
by one’s epistemic limitations, then ‘owning’ these limitations looks like a promising
solution. I discuss a range of behaviours that I take to be reflective of this disposition
and which look especially helpful here. As I argue, the person who owns their limitations
will take future-directed steps to address their ignorance and bias, with a view to
preventing its negative impact in future interactions with friends. They will also take
steps to address these impacts during the interactions with their friend. And they will
take retrospective steps to address the negative effects that their limitations may have
had on their friend in the past. Doing so will, I contend, either reduce the likelihood of
the privileged friend committing epistemic injustice against their marginalised friend, or
allow such injustices to be acknowledged and responded to in a salutary way, that need
not undermine the goods of the friendship overall.
