There’s a trope that law school self-selects for people who like to argue. Let’s assume that’s true. Even if you like to argue – or, pedantically, you might call it “debate” – you may not be going about it in the most productive way. If law school is all about education, the way we go about disagreements and conversing about opposing views needs to also be about education. This is where we need The Principle of Charity.

The Principle of Charity concerns the way we go about assessing an argument or particular viewpoint: in essence, before we attack or disagree, we must seek the most charitable interpretation, or looking at it from the most persuasive light. It’s about our methodology and entails suspending our own beliefs while seeking a sympathetic understanding of the idea in question before evaluating it.

This sounds easy, but it is especially difficult when we feel our views are being attacked and we recoil almost instinctively. We ought to avoid our initial reaction to disagree and tolerate any trivial mistakes in order to understand the larger context; the larger aim, here, is a cooperative enterprise at understanding the other’s views and trying to get at the truth together instead of 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.”[1] Maybe people fail to convey exactly what they have on their mind, or maybe they do and others interpret it the wrong way. Second, we have various cognitive biases which can create blinds spots in our reasoning. Instead of getting defensive at the possibility of being wrong, we should exercise humility and be more sensitive to the possibility that we 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 actually care more about learning from each other. Does this mean that we shouldn’t be skeptical? No, the idea is to be skeptical in the right way – specifically, jettisoning intellectual arrogance or being overly obtuse.

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 are late for class.

You wait until the last minute to do your essay and you do really well. Perhaps 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 started your essay earlier.

Going to Google and typing in something like “my views” and “correct” to see what others have to say. This way of selectively searching to confirm your own views is particularly dangerous with modern personalization algorithms that conjure up views matching your own. The resultant echo chamber is the worst sort of partiality and fails to be critical in any meaningful way.  

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[1] W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass: The M. I. T. Press, 1960), 59.