Disagreeing charitably with others: a guide

Purporting to give advice about how to be charitable to people you disagree with is always an act of hubris. People you disagree with likely have their own opinions on the subject!

But my readers are among the most ideologically diverse groups of readers for a Substack of this size (especially if you include all the Communists I keep banning for apologizing for the USSR or Mao’s China). I have readers who are evangelical Christians, Catholics both orthodox and cafeteria, neopagans, and strident atheists. I have readers who are feminists and readers who are men’s rights activists. I have readers who work for Anthropic, readers who think working for Anthropic is literally driving humanity extinct, and readers who think this AI stuff is as much of a bubble as cryptocurrency. I have libertarian readers, socialist readers, boring center-left readers, boring center-right readers, and whatever the fuck Richard Hanania is. So I feel I must be doing something right.

Pick Your Opposing Ideologies Carefully

I can’t engage charitably with the idea that animal cruelty is okay. When someone says that chickens are automatons or nonhuman and so it’s all right to do whatever you want to them, I don’t have any sort of sensible counterargument. Instead, I break into tears, which maybe says good things about my love of animals but which is absolutely useless for convincing anyone of anything.

And so, if you read through my writings on animal advocacy, you will observe that I almost never engage with the claim that it’s all right to do whatever you want to chickens. When I disagree with people about animal advocacy, I usually assume that all my readers agree that factory farming is a moral atrocity, because the idea that it isn’t is an idea I can’t deal with.

Similarly, I find anti-PEPFAR people morally repugnant. I did in fact engage with anti-PEPFAR beliefs but you might notice that I wasn’t very charitable about them.

What beliefs you struggle to engage with charitably is personal and individual. I can engage with pro-life beliefs, but I have a friend who is severely phobic of pregnancy who can’t, because from her perspective pro-life people support state-sponsored torture of her in particular. I know trans people who can’t engage with viewpoints in which they’re “really” their assigned sexes. I know gender-critical people who can’t engage with pro-trans beliefs, because it feels like they’re being asked to doublethink about their own internal classification system. I know people who can’t engage charitably with feminists because they experienced cancel culture in the past and even a mild disagreement with feminists makes them feel like their lives are going to be destroyed. I know people who have the same “this viewpoint is evil and I can’t believe people seriously espouse it” take as I do about support for factory farming, but their view is about libertarianism or socialism or Catholicism or atheism or being pro-choice.

The first step to charitable disagreement is humility. (Humility is also the third, fourth, sixth, and eighth steps.) Know what beliefs make you feel scared, enraged, attacked, threatened, or full of despair about the innate evil of human nature. Accept that you aren’t able to approach those beliefs with an open mind and willingness to admit error. You might decide that you want to argue about those beliefs anyway (as I did in my PEPFAR post), but don’t hold yourself to standards of charity that you’re never going to be able to meet.

Be Curious

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth, and this is particularly true for trying to understand people you disagree with.

I think it basically doesn’t work to say to yourself, “good people are charitable to people they disagree with! I am supposed to consider all sides of the issue with an open mind! I must try to understand what my opponent believes, rather than dismissing them purely because they’re a member of the outgroup!” If you’re doing it out of moral duty, you’re going to do the absolute minimum necessary. You’re going to find some explanation that feels charitable but that doesn’t challenge you too much or require too much work on your part, and then you’re going to congratulate yourself on a job well done.

If you want to really engage charitably with someone you disagree with, you have to be fascinated by them. You want your natural reaction, when you notice something strange or inconsistent about their viewpoints, to be “huh, I wonder how this makes sense to them. I want to know more.” If your natural reaction is instead “ha! Proof these people I disagree with are stupid and/or evil”, and you try to override it by force of will because you know you ought to be charitable, you’re unlikely to succeed.

I don’t know how to make yourself curious. I’ve always thought that details of other people’s belief systems are The Most Interesting Thing, so I don’t have a ton of advice here.

I do think it’s important to find friends who value intellectual diversity. It’s very difficult to access genuine curiosity if you know that your friends will respond to “actually, people we disagree with believe this thing” with “why do you understand what The Enemy believes? Why are you defending The Enemy? Is it because you’re one of them? Shame! Shame the nonbeliever!” Your brain naturally shuts down emotions and desires that would lead to all your friends yelling at you.

Note that you should pay attention to what your friends actually think about people who disagree with them, and not about whether they say they like intellectual diversity. Often, people say they value intellectual diversity as a sort of team color: they are on the Values Intellectual Diversity Team, and it hasn’t occurred to them that this means they actually have to tolerate people they disagree with. Observe what happens when your friends have deeply held disagreements. It’s a good sign if the answer is, often, “people lightheartedly tease them about it, sometimes people have more-or-less civil arguments, sometimes the topic is banned from the dinner table and both parties are clearly going to some effort to be polite to each other.” It’s a bad sign if the answer is always “everyone stops inviting them to parties and shittalks them in group chats that they aren’t in.” If people can say “these are the viewpoints that will make everyone hate you”, that’s a better sign than if they’re like “all viewpoints are welcome here”—every social group puts some viewpoints off-limits, and a good social group is honest about which.

I’d also suggest reading intellectual history or thinkers from centuries ago. You are likely less threatened by the views of the Warring States Period Mohists, because they aren’t a live political threat, and you’d have to have a very unusual social group for them to be viewed as The Enemy.

Everyone Is Valid

In dialectical behavioral therapy, they say that not every thought or emotion or desire is justifiable, but every thought or emotion or desire is valid.

If a thought or emotion or desire is justifiable, it means that it is a logical, proportionate response to the situation that triggered it. You’re like “I believe that vaccines are safe and healthy” because you read a book about vaccines or you trust your doctor, or “I feel scared” because you’re about to take an important test you didn’t study for and are definitely going to fail, or “I want to watch that movie” because your friend recommended it to you and they have great taste.

People very regularly have thoughts, emotions, and desires that aren’t justifiable. Many thoughts, emotions, and desires are complete nonsense. It is the human condition.

If a thought or emotion or desire is valid, it means there is some grain of truth to it. It means that there is some reason that someone remotely connected to this plane of reality would think or feel or want that thing. All thoughts and feelings and desires are valid, because people don’t think or feel or want things for literally no reason. You can always find the kernel of truth in any viewpoint.

I’m not gender-critical, but I can agree that trans men are importantly different from cis men in many ways and that (with present technology) people can’t change from producing eggs to producing sperm. I’m not pro-life, but I can understand why someone would think any genetically unique human individual has a right to life. I’m not Catholic, but I agree that Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero are admirable.

“All thoughts, emotions, and desires are valid” isn’t really an empirical belief that can be true or false. I don’t know how you could prove that a belief is definitely invalid. It’s more of an approach or framework. If you come at a belief system with the unshakeable assumption that there’s something true and good about it, you will generally find something true and good.

Engage With People You Respect

Almost every viewpoint is held by at least one person who is worthy of respect.¹ That is, almost every viewpoint is held by at least one person who is intelligent, well-informed, curious, wise, willing to admit mistakes and weak points in their arguments, careful in their citations, compassionate about those in pain, helpful to people in need, kind to others, and fair to people who disagree with them.

You should always strive to find writers and speakers you respect and to get most of your information about opposing viewpoints from them. Ideally, find people you would like to be friends with-- someone who would make you smile if you ran into them at a party or in a group chat.

When I was listing off good qualities people have, I was mostly listing off intellectual virtues. But I think moral virtues are, if anything, even more important. It’s much easier to engage charitably with people if you believe they’re sincerely pursuing a vision of the Good that bears at least a passing resemblance to yours. I have an easier time with libertarians and conservative Christians than I do with other conservatives. Libertarians believe, like me, that you should let harmless weirdos alone unless they’re bothering someone; conservative Christians believe, like me, that we should devote a significant share of our resources to helping the global poor. These are, like, two of my three most important moral intuitions, so naturally I feel more sympathy to people who seem to share them.

It also helps to read people who are funny.

Evangelical Christian writers I respect include Mark Yarhouse, Warren Throckmorton, Sheila Wray Gregoire, and Russell Moore. Catholic writers I respect include Eve Tushnet, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Simcha Fischer, and Helen Roy. Radical feminist writers I respect include Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, and Catherine MacKinnon. Anarchist writers I respect include Dean Spade and James C. Scott.

Similarly, it is usually best to get your information about people you disagree with from books. Any idiot can write a blog post or comment on social media, and they usually do. Most people think about their social media posts for about thirty seconds before hitting ‘post’, so they wind up saying obvious nonsense that they wouldn’t believe if they thought about it for five minutes. Similarly, people say stuff they don’t really believe when they’re riffing while on a livestream or podcast. And social media posts tend to leave out context, ranging from “the poster assumed everyone who read their praise of Mao’s Patriotic Health Campaign knew they think the Great Leap Forward was bad” to “the poster was saying something intentionally absurd as a joke.”

A book takes a lot of work, so you can be confident that it reflects the strongest version of the writer’s views, the version they deliberated over to make sure it says exactly what they mean and addresses all the counterarguments they can think of. A book also has a lot of words in it [citation needed], so you’re likely to have the full explanation of someone’s views, so you won’t be missing crucial context about their gestalt impression of Mao as a human being.

Anyone can self-publish a book. But if a book is traditionally published, or if it got reviews in mainstream publications, then some people other than the author were willing to vouch for it. A traditionally published or well-reviewed book likely represents a mainstream position. On the other hand, if you read social media posts or self-published writing, you’ll likely find works by a single wacko who doesn’t accurately represent anyone besides herself.

When People Tell You What They Believe, Believe Them

People fall into two opposite errors here.

The first error (most common among rationalists) is to believe that other people’s beliefs are less evil by your lights than they actually are. Sometimes someone says something like:

• “I sincerely hate men. Men are worthless.”

• “I don’t like poly people because poly people are ugly.”

• “Feminism is bad because it made women be slutty and sluts are disgusting and repulsive.”

• “Poor African children had better die and decrease the surplus population.”

And then other people, trying to be charitable, are like “I think what this person actually meant is...”

• “Sexism and rape culture is bad.”

• “Men coerce women into polyamory against their will, leading to unstable relationships and unhappy women.”

• “Feminism is bad because most women are happier in committed, monogamous relationships than they are in hookup culture.”

• “If we want a wealthy society where everyone can be healthy and prosperous, we need to focus on economic growth in the developed world, which will naturally improve conditions in the developing world.”

This drives me batty.

I think if someone says “I sincerely hate men”, you should take them at their word and assume that they hate men! Every time someone has said “I sincerely hate men and this is not a joke,” and I talked to them more about their beliefs, it turned out that they indeed were hatefully prejudiced against half the human race!² People generally don’t go about saying that they believe heinous shit while secretly having some more justifiable version of their beliefs in their back pocket. Sometimes people actually do believe things that make you think less of them.

It is good to have accurate beliefs about people. Most people have a bias towards assuming others are worse than they really are, so to correct for that most people should make an effort to find sympathetic interpretations of others’ beliefs and behavior. But it isn’t inherently virtuous to believe that people are acting in a way that happens to be sympathetic to you. Sometimes people actually do believe things you think are evil!

The second error (most common among normal people) is to believe that other people’s beliefs are more evil by your lights than they actually are. From this you get “pro-life people aren’t really concerned about fetuses, they just want to control women’s bodies” or “AI safety advocates don’t really believe AI might kill everyone, they’re just trying to raise Anthropic’s stock prices” or “capitalists are deliberately hoarding resources because they like it when poor people starve” or “socialists are just envious of people who are richer and more competent than they are.”

People who believe evil things are more than happy to say so. Lots of people post all day on the Internet about how they want to control women’s bodies. Those people can be fairly accused of wanting to control other people’s bodies. Other pro-life people, who say “I respect women’s bodily autonomy but I also think killing fetuses is murder”, probably actually do think that killing fetuses is murder.

People who believe evil stuff usually believe that the evil stuff is good, which is why they believe it; no one other than Skeletor is going around being evil because they think being evil is fun. Since they believe their heinous beliefs are good, they feel comfortable saying them out in public in front of God and everyone. Even people who believe the rare beliefs that are strongly and universally stigmatized (such as scientific racism or pro-pedophilia activism) can’t stop darkly hinting about the forbidden truths the Man doesn’t want you to know.

I may be accused of being irredeemably autistic, but I think you should basically take people at their word when they say they believe stuff. I have seen a lot of explanations of what this or that group really believes, on a deep fundamental level that they refuse to admit. Every time, these explanations seemed calculated more to fulfill the emotional needs of the writers than to actually say anything true about the world.

Other People Think The Same Way You Do

Even if you’re neurodivergent, you were probably born with basically the same hardware as any other human. You have the same basic wants, like friendship, social status, fun, physical pleasure, and mastery of complex skills. You feel fear, anger, joy, disgust, hatred, love. You like looking at cute things, feel an impulse to treat people with fairness and help those in need, and are sometimes lazy.

You likely share even more specific experiences with some groups you disagree with. For example, as an animal advocate, I feel like my society is engaged in an ongoing atrocity that I’m complicit in, because people act like some moral patients don’t matter just because they’re weak and vulnerable. Pro-life people feel the same thing I do. I disagree with them about whether fetuses have a right to life, and presumably many of them disagree with me about whether the way we treat chickens is unconscionable animal cruelty. But I have a visceral understanding of what it’s like to talk to someone I quite like, someone who always helps people move and gives to charity and calls her grandma once a week, and think “there is a one in four chance this person has committed murder.”

People’s beliefs often come from their moral intuitions. You almost certainly have the same basic moral instincts as any other human, although you might reject some of them upon reflection. You believe, at least a little bit, in being kind to others, helping the weak and powerless, doing good to people who helped you, treating everyone equally, being loyal to your friends and family, obeying legitimate authorities, respecting others’ freedom, avoiding impurities, and keeping sacred things sacred. You have likely learned that (say) nepotism is wrong, but you have the same basic intuitions about family loyalty that make some people think it’s wrong not to give a sinecure to their failcousin. Similarly, people in heavily nepotistic cultures have the same basic intuitions about treating everyone fairly that make you think it’s wrong to be nepotistic.

Here is one of the places where humility helps you. The more aware you are of your own flaws, the easier it is to understand those flaws in others. I have the natural human tendency towards xenophobia and discomfort with “foreign”-feeling ethnic groups. I have an intuition that it’s morally wrong to do things I think are disgusting. I enjoy saying and doing things that I imagine would anger people I don’t like. I care more about vivid, heart-wrenching anecdotes than I do about very large numbers. I am often convinced that something is morally wrong, and then I do it anyway, because doing the morally right thing is unpleasant or inconvenient. When I say that someone I disagree with is xenophobic or motivated by disgust or an edgelord troll or emotionally unmoved by numbers or rationalizing their own laziness, I feel empathy, because these are flaws I have too.

Don’t Swap Other People’s Beliefs For Changelings

In European folklore, the fairies sometimes steal a human child and replace them with a changeling. If you casually look at the changeling, they seem exactly like the child they replaced. But as you spend more time with the changeling, they start to seem uncanny, somehow wrong in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. Every individual way they’re odd seems like you’re making a big deal out of nothing, but as they add up you realize this is not your child.

Don’t swap other people’s beliefs for changelings.

I observe this most often when people try to “steelman” other people’s viewpoints—that is, to come up with the “strongest” version of someone else’s beliefs. In principle, steelmanning is good. If you happen to know evidence for someone’s claim that they don’t, by all means bring it up. But in practice, by “strongest” people often mean “most convincing to me personally”, and then you run into problems.

The version of Communism that is most convincing to me is not the version of Communism any actual Communists actually believe, because I’m not a Communist. If people believed the version of Communism that was convincing to me, I would already be a Communist.

Communists have fundamental disagreements with me about morality, worldview, epistemology, political approach and empirical facts, which explains why I’m a squishy center-left Slow Boring reader who has never put a hammer and sickle on my laptop. When I try to come up with a version of Communism that is convincing and appealing to me, I come up with a version grounded in my morality, worldview, epistemology, political approach, and empirical facts—that is, a version that is unrecognizable to actually existing Communists. Depending on how well I articulate my assumptions, they might be able to point out what I’m doing, or they might wind up sputtering incoherently while going “that’s not right”—like the mother who knows her child has been stolen by the fairies but sounds crazy whenever she tries to say how she knows.

I think a lot of attempts at steelmanning wind up failing to reckon with difference and deeply held disagreement. You wind up acting like other people’s belief systems are failed versions of your own, instead of something that makes sense from experiences and assumptions you happen not to share. But other people aren’t inferior versions of you. Their beliefs make sense from their own perspective, and if you want to understand them you have to try to inhabit that perspective.

Here’s that humility thing again. People disagree with you, and not just about their religions or preferred political or economic systems. They disagree about how much we should care about morality, what kind of evidence should change your mind, whether we should do big changes or small reforms, how common conspiracies are, whether people are basically trustworthy, and whether you should try to murder someone for calling you a liar. You can understand these positions, because you have the same hardware as they do. But you won’t be able to until you understand that they actually do disagree with you, and aren’t just you but confused.

1. Nazism is an exception. Probably there are others.

2. Caveat: some people say “I hate men” as the same kind of frustrated hyperbole that makes some retail workers say “I hate customers.” I think this is bad behavior, but it’s not a sincerely endorsed belief of the kind I’m talking about here. You can tell frustrated hyperbole apart from sincere man-hating because if you ask the people in the former group will say “no, I don’t really hate men, I was just mad.”