Humility has been found to be the correlative interest for one's pursuit of duties related to self; but Kant's, and our own, suspicion that recognition of duties to self is somehow previous to and a condition of recognition and proper fulfillment of duties to others raises the question of how this attitude of humility, itself tied to the obligatory end of self-perfection, could be important also for recognition and fulfillment of one's obligatory end toward others.

A general answer to this question can be stipulated: if recognizing the value and needs of other persons, and the resulting obligation these place on oneself, depends upon recognizing their situation to be similar to one's own (and not simply as being better or worse, more or less valuable than oneself); then knowing one's own value and moral status in the way that has been suggested the humble person knows it is indeed previous to adequate recognition of one's obligation to others. Accepting oneself as a dependent and corrupt but capable and dignified agent is a condition for being able to recognize this identical state in other persons. Without such recognition, I could not characterize the situation of others as such, nor be able to respond in appropriate ways to it. Humility – that is, the integration of this substantial self-knowledge into a pervasive life-guiding meta-attitude as discussed in Part III – is thus a condition for recognizing one's obligatory end relative to other persons reliably and consistently.