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Why intellectual humility isn’t always a virtue | Aeon Essays

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Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York in 1963. Courtesy the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society by Rachel Fraser + BIO Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York in 1963. Courtesy the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow of Exeter College. From January 2025, she’ll be associate professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edited byNigel Warburton Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character,

Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character. Part of living well, though, is…

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