Responsibility,Humility, and Intervention

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of The Responsibility to Protect that is rooted in the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. R2P rests on three central claims: sovereignty ought to be understood in terms of responsibility rather than control, the just cause criterion for war should include humanitarian protection, and rightful authority ought to be relocated to multilateral institutions. In turn, Niebuhr’s Christian realism proposes a dialectic of responsibility and humility that shapes our understanding of justice and coercion. While examining R2P through a Niebuhrian lens shows some compatibility between the two moral frameworks, it also reveals the insufficient understanding of humility with respect to human motivations and limitations that underlies R2P’s criteria.     

Intellectual Humility and the Ends of the Virtues: Conflicting Aretaic Desiderata

This essay demonstrates that disagreement about how to characterize intellectual humility masks deeper disagreement about the ends the intellectual virtues are meant to serve. This has been largely unacknowledged in discussions of intellectual humility, and of the intellectual virtues generally. Despite disclaimers, contestants often proceed as though there is an available unified account of the virtue that, with enough persuasion, all could be brought to accept. This essay contends a shared account is unlikely and therefore such persuasive efforts miss the point. What is needed, rather, is more attention to the kinds of desiderata that are being privileged in the various accounts: what are the conceptions of human nature and human flourishing driving different accounts? I use a simple method to make my case. I begin with the two best contemporary efforts to characterize intellectual humility. I show why each side's attempts to persuade the other are likely to fail. I then show that even if some unified account of intellectual humility could be cobbled together from these two proposals, it could not capture at least one historically influential account of intellectual humility, one found in the writings of Augustine. In a concluding section, I offer an interpretation of why the project of finding a shared account of intellectual humility seems sure to fail. I argue that liberal political commitments drive much of the contemporary discussion of the intellectual virtues, and the extent to which agreement seems attainable is correlative to the extent we are willing to allow liberalism to determine the desiderata for an account of the virtues.     

Revisiting Gendered Representations of Humility: An Examination of Sources from Late Medieval Italy

During the Middle Ages, gender-neutral representations of humility as a quality linked to spiritual love and voluntary service competed with representations according to gendered patterns, such as those related to the naked and dressed body in terms of its biological and social functions and its appearance. Moving from Dante's examples of humility in Purgatory, Canto X, this article focuses on representations of humility in textual and pictorial sources authored by women and men between the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Italy. By showing the complexity of these representations, this article revisits and reconsiders one-sided historiographical narratives according to which humility in the Middle Ages was intrinsically, persistently and negatively related to feminine suppression and servility.     

Bridewealth,dowry, property,and economics

Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. ix + 169 pp. Tables, figures, notes, and bibliography. $11.50.     

Competence,representations, rules,and inquiry

Anderson, Stephen R. Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. x + 373 pp. including references and name and subject indices. $40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

Paikeday, Thomas M. The Native Speaker is Dead! Toronto: Paikeday Publishers, 1985. xiv + 109 pp. including appendices, references, and name index. $7.50.