FYE: The principle of charity: No blame, no shame

By "charity", we mean one of the older senses of the word—that of "kindness", rather than its more recent meaning of "philanthropy". We will have more to say about philanthropy and professionalism when we discuss humanism as a shared professional healthcare ethical value.

In this book, I’m going to assume good faith and good intentions when I talk about behaviors and rhetoric that are counterproductive. But we have to speak honestly and frankly, for our clients’ sake, because that's how high the stakes are in reality for them.

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John Wilkins, an Australian philosopher, writes about how to engage in debate and inquiry with others in a constructive way:

When I teach critical reasoning just about the first thing I teach is the principle of charity. It has many formulations:

"This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the other person’s words and attitudes in such a way as to render their speech and other behavior intelligible. This necessarily requires us to see others as much like ourselves in point of overall coherence and correctness—that we see them as more or less rational creatures mentally inhabiting a world much like our own." [Donald Davidson]

To put this in everyday language, Wilkins is calling on us to assume that the person that we are engaging with experiences life and thinks in a way similar to the way we do. In this, he recommends acting in a way consistent with the altruistic maxim of reciprocity. This maxim is found in many cultures, and is often referred to in US culture as the "Golden Rule": "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", or "Love your neighbor as yourself".

Assume that the other participant is—like you—interested in reasoning in a valid way, in making sense, and in gaining knowledge, so if their argument makes no sense, don't just begin by writing them off as silly and misguided—instead, try to find what sense it makes to them. It may turn out that the discussion goes nowhere, and it's fine to withdraw from it in that case. But our default (initial) behavior is to engage, and to try to communicate with others, on the assumption that—like us—they are interested in understanding the natural world, and learning from each other.

"In its simplest form, it holds that (other things being equal) one’s interpretation of another speaker’s words should minimize the ascription of false beliefs to that speaker." [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]

"This [Principle of Charity] says that if interpreting as reasoning a passage which is not obviously reasoning yields only bad arguments, assume it is not reasoning. (The rationale for this approach is that we are interested in finding out the truth about things rather than in scoring points off people.)" [Alec Fisher]

The point, even of lively debate and very vivid argumentation, is to seek points of agreement where knowledge can emerge, rather than just to win the argument at the expense of the other participant(s).

There are many other quotations, for which I am indebted to Neil Thomason. However, the general point is that, when arguing with somebody, and they say something that seems on the face of it silly, try to reframe the statement so it makes the maximum amount of reasonable sense – that is, if the person’s statement can be reasonably interpreted in a coherent manner, do so.

You are not called upon to agree with everything that someone else says, nor are you called upon to pour all your time and effort into an argument that has no hope of resolution. But you are expected to start out with the assumption that the other person is arguing in good faith, and that their argument makes sense to them, and to try to find a way in which that is true.

Wilkins' entire post here is worth reading. It is very likely that you have not been exposed to all of the philosophy jargon that he uses in it, so don't let that deter you or cause you to feel unprepared—he is a philosopher, and he is writing for an audience that has already been exposed to those ideas. Instead, you can just accept that there are additional ideas there that you can't be expected to fully understand until you have been exposed to them, but just get what additional meaning you can out of his discussion of the Principle of Charity in his post.

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The science writer and educator Thomas Levenson has a similar principle:

[M]y usual instructions to my students [are] to always give the opposing argument the most generous reading possible.

Notice Levenson's word "generous", as well as the word "charity" we've been using. This leads us directly into our next topic: abundance, or margin.

We’ll also follow that principle in this book. Like Wilkins and Levenson, we’ll make the default (starting) assumption that the other person we’re trying to debate or communicate with is attempting to communicate in a good-faith way that makes sense, as they best understand it. We won’t give up on engaging and communicating with others without making a fair try to connect first of all.