No Limits or Know Limits?
Why the virtues of humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty allow us to know when we should break through limits, and when we should respect them.
David McPherson
Today we often hear slogans about importance of having “no limits” or “boundless aspirations.” We are also given messages about how it is good to have “limitless possibilities.” All of this is expressive of a cultural ethos that celebrates unbridled individual choice and endorses a maximizing mindset that presumes more is better. While this cultural ethos is distinctive of our late modern age, nevertheless, it must be recognized that human beings have always tried to push their boundaries, and this has often been part of how we have achieved what is best in our humanity. At the same time, this limit-transcending feature of human life is also part of our potential downfall, as it can lead to dehumanization. In my book The Virtues of Limits, published with Oxford University Press in March 2022, I explore the place of limits within a well-lived human life and develop and defend an original account of what I call “limiting virtues,” which are concerned with recognizing proper limits in human life.
The limiting virtues that are my focus are humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty. Here I want to provide an overview of these virtues and how they help us to know our limits and thereby enable us to live well as human beings.
My account of the limiting virtues begins from a reflection on two fundamental existential stances, or orientations toward “the given,” that is, what exists. One stance we can take toward the given is the choosing-controlling stance. All mature human beings adopt this stance to some extent in their efforts to improve their lives and the world around them through controlling, transforming, and overcoming the given. However, at the extreme, this stance can give expression to a “Promethean” project of “playing God” by seeking mastery over the given. The other basic existential stance is at odds with this Promethean project: I refer to it as the accepting-appreciating stance. By accepting and appreciating the given, it imposes limits on the choosing-controlling stance.
While I acknowledge an important role for a choosing-controlling stance in human life, I argue that the accepting-appreciating stance should be regarded as primary for three main reasons. First, we need to be properly responsive to what is of value in the given world in order to know how to act (or not act). In other words, the accepting-appreciating stance should inform when and how we take up the choosing-controlling stance. Second, given the limits of our existence, we need to recognize that a state of perfection will never be realized through our efforts, and so we need a way of living with and being at home in the world amidst imperfection, which means that we need a way of coming to see life in the world as good and worth affirming despite the ill. Third, in an important sense our achievements are not in fact complete without our appreciation of them. Consider the creation story in Genesis, where God creates the world in six days and then completes his creation through appreciating it—where he contemplatively beholds it as “very good”—and resting on the seventh day. The practice of the Sabbath imitates God in creation: it completes our own work through restful appreciation of this work as well as the world in which we live. It is therefore important to cultivate a sabbath-orientation in our lives.
On my account, the limiting virtues help us to achieve the proper relationship between the choosing-controlling stance and the accepting-appreciating stance. In this regard, humility can be viewed as the master limiting virtue: it ensures that we recognize and live out our proper place in the scheme of things. As a limiting virtue, it is especially concerned with reining in the Promethean tendency to “play God” in seeking mastery over the given world, which has become especially prominent in the modern world and is exemplified in a certain scientific-technological mindset. The virtue of humility recognizes that some things must be accepted and appreciated as given, and not subject to human control or manipulation. It properly acknowledges our dependency on others and on the natural world, as well as on values (or goods) not of our own making for living well and meaningfully as human beings. The virtue of humility also properly acknowledges our natural, personal, and moral limitations.
The limiting virtue of reverence is concerned with being properly responsive, through reverential attitudes and behavior, to that which is reverence-worthy (e.g., human life and its sources) and which places strong constraints on our will. It is closely connected with humility because being properly responsive to that which is reverence-worthy helps to define our proper place in the scheme of things. The virtue of reverence plays an important humanizing role within the process of character formation, which is something that has been well recognized in Confucian thought with the emphasis on reverent manners. Additionally, reverence is necessary for properly recognizing absolute moral prohibitions (e.g., against taking innocent human life). A culture that has lost a sense of reverence will be one that is prone to dehumanizing actions.
The limiting virtue of moderation also plays an important humanizing role within the process of character formation, which is something well recognized by Aristotle. Moderation is a limiting virtue because it is concerned with avoiding vicious extremes. Within character formation, moderation in the form of temperance enables us not to be enslaved to animal appetite and makes us receptive to what is ennobling of our humanity. Within the political domain, moderation is also important, especially in our age of extremes, where political polarization and fragmentation abound, which leads to increased conflict and threatens the bond of political community. Moderation counteracts this and helps to preserve the bond of the political community and realize the good that is possible; it is a key part of a “politics of imperfection.”
The limiting virtue of contentment is the virtue of knowing when enough is enough, of not wanting more than is needed for a good life. It does not deny that we ought in many ways to seek improvement, but it acknowledges that we need to find a way to be at home in the world amidst imperfection. This requires that we cultivate a grateful or appreciative orientation toward the given world, where we begin by counting our blessings. The virtue of contentment plays a key role in a politics of imperfection, where we seek a good enough condition, and which endorses sufficientarian justice, where what is important is that people have enough to live well. The virtue of contentment is also important for counteracting the vice of greed and for realizing a “home economics” that seeks to recover something of Aristotle’s idea of oikonomia as centering on the home (oikos), but also contributing to the common good of the particular communities to which one belongs. It recognizes that we need a way of living our economic life that contributes to our being properly at home in the world, rather than causing alienation.
The limiting virtue of neighborliness is a form of human solidarity that recognizes the moral significance of proximity. It stands opposed to impartialist moral theories, such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, which do not recognize the moral significance of proximity. While it has been overlooked or disregarded by such moral theories, the virtue of neighborliness has had a prominent place in Western culture due to the influence of the biblical teachings regarding love of neighbor. As we see in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, our neighbor whom we are to love is not just someone who lives nearby and who is part of our community, but anyone—including strangers—we encounter face-to-face. This focus on concrete rather than abstract humanity should inform how we think about our duties of assistance. It should also inform how we think about the bonds and bounds of political community: we should embrace a form of patriotism connected with a humane localism, which recognizes the dignity of our common humanity but also acknowledges the placed, local nature of our lives.
When we love and care for those who are there in our lives, we will form identity-constituting bonds of attachment with some of these particular people and will come to recognize demands of loyalty to them that sustain the good of the relationship and which give grateful recognition to the good we have received from them. The virtue of loyalty is a limiting virtue that expresses proper partiality, and thus it places limits on the extent of our attachments and how far we can be expected to go in pursuing impartial concern. It involves binding attachment that is maintained through thick and thin, which includes loyalty to friends and family as well as loyalty to one’s country and fellow citizens. It is also important to embrace what I call “loyalty to the given,” which recognizes that the given world places demands upon us for loyalty, and we fail to be properly responsive to existing value by refusing to belong to the given world. Such loyalty to the given provides the wider context in which more particular loyalties find their proper place.
In sum, this account of the limiting virtues suggests that if we want a slogan for living well as human beings, then it should not be “no limits” but rather “know limits.”
David McPherson is an associate professor of philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. For the academic year 2021-22 he is on sabbatical as a visiting research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. David is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
