There’s a trope that law school self-selects for people who like to argue. But even if you like to argue, you may not be going about it in the most productive way. If law school is all about education, the way we converse about opposing views should follow suit. This is where we need the principle of charity.
The principle of charity addresses how we should assess an argument or particular viewpoint. In essence, before we disagree with an opposing perspective, we must seek the most charitable interpretation, or, in other words, consider it in the most persuasive light. It’s about the methodology we use when confronting new opinions; it entails suspending our own beliefs while seeking a sympathetic understanding of the idea in question before evaluating it.
This sounds easy, but it is often difficult in practice. When we feel our views are being attacked, we recoil almost instinctively. However, we ought to avoid our initial impulse to disagree and instead tolerate trivial mistakes in order to understand the broader context. The goal here is a cooperative enterprise, which attempts to understand the other party’s views and tries to reach the truth together, rather than emphasizing contradictions or contentions.
Why is this necessary? For one, communication is imperfect—often, things go wrong. As W.V.O. Quine wrote, “assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of languages.” Sometimes people fail to convey exactly what they have on their minds. Other times they succeed, but their words are interpreted incorrectly.
Secondly, we have different cognitive biases, which have the potential to create blinds spots in our reasoning. Instead of getting defensive at the possibility of being wrong, we should exercise humility and acknowledge the possibility that we have misunderstood something. We are fallible and we are generally not very good at getting at the complete truth by ourselves.
We should forget about trying to look right (or avoid being wrong) and instead focus our collective energy towards learning from each other. This does not mean that we shouldn’t be skeptical. However, the goal is to be skeptical in the right way by setting aside our own intellectual arrogance.
I want to close with a couple of everyday examples of cognitive mistakes we make to underscore the necessity of intellectual humility:
A driver cuts you off and you label them a jerk. It’s equally possible that they didn’t see you or had a personal emergency. You’ve probably cut someone off before and didn’t label yourself a jerk—perhaps you blamed it on your lack of sleep or the fact that you were late for class.
You wait until the last minute to do your essay and you do really well. You might attribute your success to the last-minute pressures, but correlation does not infer causation. You might have done just as well or better if you had started your essay earlier.
Go to Google and type in something like “my views” and “correct” to see what others have to say. The ability to selectively search to confirm your own views is particularly dangerous, given the availability of modern personalization algorithms that can conjure up views matching your own. The resulting echo chamber is the worst sort of partiality and fails to be critical in any meaningful way.