A bit of Driver

I read Driver's response to your paper. I think that she has the right sort of critique of your positive account, but her own account still seems misguided.

Early on she gives a few examples of where ignorance is valued for some reason or another, but it would be a critical mistake to assume that a thing's being valued can lead to it in certain forms being a virtue. Youth, for example, is valued in our culture and so is wealth yet neither have any forms that turn out to be virtues. Youthfulness is no virtue and neither is the disposition to accumulate riches. But at any rate, her own examples do not even seem so good in this regard. She claims that ignorance of one's own beauty is said to enhance it, but this seems clearly false. One who does not continually point out her beauty is not thought to be more beautiful for not doing so but rather (maybe) more attractive as a person. This is of course the sense of attractive that does not mean only physically but considers all desirable traits. Furthermore, consider two people of equal beauty (twins say) one of whom know how beautiful she is while the other does not. Does Driver truly expect us to believe that the ignorant one is more beautiful than the other? What is valued is the lack of a "look at me attitude" which is consistent with knowing that one is quite beautiful. One might even think that being ignorant of one's beauty and for this reason not having the "look at me attitude" is nothing special at all. It is one who seems themselves in all their glory and truly see some things of great value who then refrains from the "look at me attitude" who is to be admired. (I would not call this person being modest either by the way, but rather displaying a sort of proper pride i.e. he does not shrink from deserved praise etc. but this is irrelevant here.) Another example she gives which I think is quite bad is that we value innocence in children. This is certainly true, but there is no way that innocence can be construed as a virtue because what it truly is is simple ignorance of the way the world actually is. One might say that innocence is the safety goggles we give children to protect them from certain facts about the world that would be too much for them to handle at their current state. Moreover, we do not value innocence in adults which really amounts to just being naive. (One might even say that this sort of ignorance is reprehensible in adults...) The point of what I have said is that, though on occasion we may value ignorance for some reason or another, it certainly does not follow that ignorance is ever a virtue.

Another point worth making is that her true/false modesty distinction is off the mark. She says that if you are talking to someone who is acting as though she is lesser than what she actually is and then you find out that she believes correctly that she is of such an such value then you will likely be offended. You would feel as though you have been patronized or condescended to. (I feel that Driver is wrapped up in her view that she can not see that this is not what condescending means...) She is just wrong about condescending. Consider these two stories: 1) After trying really hard to master some particular skill a player becomes frustrated. In order to raise the player's spirits his coach takes him aside and says that he should not feel bad as the coach himself had a lot of trouble with this skill when he was first learning it. Suppose that this boosts the players confidence and he goes on to succeed, but then later discovers that the coach never had any trouble learning that skill. Does the player now feel as though he has been condescended to? 2) Another player is learning a similar skill and having the same difficulties. His coach, noticing the problems, comments to the player that he should not feel bad about having difficulties as he is scrawny and weak and, well, no ever thought he could do it anyway. Does this player feel condescended to? Quite clearly, the first case is not an example of condescending behavior while the second case is. The point here is that false modesty has nothing to do with condescending behavior. In the first case the coach is an excellent candidate for false modesty on Driver's view, but is clearly not truly the case. He is not falsely modest despite the fact that he acted as though he believed something that he did not in fact believe but he did it for a noble purpose i.e. to help the struggling player. If Driver's account requires that this coach be falsely modest, then her account is wrong.

(What is a better account of false modesty? The only one that I think there is is the Christian one. This is that one behaves modestly at all times, saying that God deserves the credit and so on, but in his heart of hearts praises himself. Whereas the truly modest person will even to himself give all praise to God. The modest person acts and believes that he is not deserving and this sounds like Drivers' account but in fact it is crucially different as on the Christian view the modest person believes correctly that he is not deserving.)

In response to one of your challenges Driver tries to show that self-deception is not always bad and that sometimes it can be good. To do this she take the example of a mother who has deceived herself into having a slightly more elevated opinion of her children than the evidence warrants. She then asks us to suppose that this in fact has very good effects as children need praise in order to realize their potential and that parents who truly believe that their child deserves praise do a better job praising. I think that Thomas's work comes in handy here. He claims that a child who was valued by her parents only for her talents and abilities would live in a veritable hell. Would Driver's envisioned parent stop praising her children if she realized that they were not all she imagined them to be? What sort of parent is this? Thomas's point is that parents love their children totally and unconditionally simply because they are theirs. This and parent's constant reaffirmation to their child that they value her is what is important for the child's flourishing. She needs to know that she will be loved and valued even if she fails or is not so good at something. So it seems that what Driver is after (i.e. that children need to see that their parents value them) is something that can not come from self-deception nor does it have anything to do with the child's abilities or anything else that one could be decieved about. Moreover, she neglects the obvious fact that chilren who are praised for abilities they do not have may begin to believe that they do have them and this undoubtebly sets them up for future failure as well a bad case of the inflated ego.

In an attempt to refine her view, Driver discusses Roger the fake-Nobel Prize laureate. He is duped into believing that he has won the Nobel prize despite the fact that he is not done any work worthy of that prize. She then discusses how on one view he could be considered modest. It is just wrongheaded, I think, to even be using this example because Roger obviously has nothing to be modest about. He just has a load of false beliefs floating around, there is no actual achievement about which he can be modest or not. (Again, she just seems so wrapped up in her view...) Another instance of this is how she claims that your example of the person who believes that he is worth less than he is but acts as though he is worth more than he is is actually an example of a modest person though here modesty is not functioning as it should. This person may be many things but he is not modest. Modesty requires a certain sort of belief and a certain sort of behavior. When I concieve of the modest individual I see someone holding up his hands and shaking his head when he is praised. If this behavior is lacking in some way then he is not modest not matter what he actually believes.

At any rate, I think that Driver's view can safely be discounted.