1. Interpretive Charity
This is Jeffrey Friedman’s term. I think that it means trying to understand someone else’s point of view before criticizing it. It means trying to set up the strongest case for the opposing point of view for counter-argument, rather than attacking a weak or straw-man version of the opposing point of view. In Bryan Caplan’s terminology, try to pass an ideological Turing test before you engage in debate.
2. Asymmetric insight
This is David McRaney’s term. It is close to the opposite of interpretive charity. It means taking the view that you understand the other side’s true motives, which they themselves do not understand.
Pete Boettke would say that public choice theory is symmetric, in that it takes people to operate under the same incentives in politics as in the market. But that is a different meaning of “symmetric.”
Many people would deny that their political motives are dominated by the pursuit of material advantage. Thus, when you claim that they are pursuing material advantage, you are claiming to have insight into their motives that they lack. That is asymmetric insight, and it is the opposite of interpretive charity. Of course, on occasion asymmetric insight is accurate and interpretive charity is too kind.
A commenter points to a passage from Dan Klein.
We just need to make clear that when we offer a description based on assumptions of self-seeking behavior, we present the description as one, simplified description of the matter, and not the one that the political participants themselves believe.
Describing behavior in ways that participants themselves do not believe is uncharitable–although, again, it might turn out to be correct. Medical professionals genuinely believe that licensing requirements protect the public. It is the economist’s task to show that this is incorrect the net effect on the public is negative, regardless of motive. Trying to ascribe self-seeking motives to the medical professionals is at best beside the point and at worst uncharitable.
Finally, let me return to the idea of interpreting “self-interest” broadly, so that it need not be limited to material advantage. . A man sacrifices his life to defend his country? Well, he had an interest in acting honorably. A man advocates for a policy that hurts his own business? Well, he had an interest in being well thought of.
If there is no limit to the breadth of your definition, then “people act in their self-interest” is a tautology. It is always true, and that makes the statement uninteresting. If you want to make an interesting statement, you have to take the risk that your statement will be false. Saying that people make choices to try to maximize material advantage is an interesting statement. It risks being false, and indeed it often is false. However, it is true in so many contexts that it is quite useful.
What if we define self-interest as a basket only slightly more broad than material goods? “Money, power, and fame,” certainly seems enough to get you all the useful bits of Public Choice without collapsing into tautology. And, couched politely, that basket would also pass your self-description test; few politicians would argue that they don’t care about their re-elections or legacies.
“Medical professionals genuinely believe that licensing requirements protect the public.”
But surely they do protect the public to some extent (a few grossly incompetent practitioners do lose licenses and are prevented from practicing, for example) — but the licensing requirements don’t help as much as the barriers to entry hurt. The overall effect is negative, but that has nothing to do with motives. So we’re not uncharitably claiming to understand their motives better than they do, we’re claiming to understand the overall effects of their preferred policies better than they do.
Thinking about it a bit further — one of the limitations of ‘Baptists and Bootleggers’ is that in that formulation, the baptists and the bootleggers are distinct groups, with different activities, interests, and motivations. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s no reason an organization can’t contain a mix of both — baptists who pursue their group’s interest out of a sincere, but misguided, belief in the public good and bootleggers who know the score and promote the group’s interest for its own sake. But the bootleggers can never be upfront about this because it would give the game away to opponents and demoralize their own baptists. Al Shanker (longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers) is alleged to have once said:
“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
This is disputed, however, and I tend to doubt he did say it — it seems very unlikely that a teacher’s union official with such a long record of success would ever be so indiscreet.
All that being the case, it seems a better strategy to leave motivations alone and focus on effects.
I actually think you uncharitably mischaracterizing the argument for people behaving in their material self interest, by not acknowledging it as a statistical tendency at the margin.
If I were to state it in the most charitable possible terms, I would say:
If an action or behavior becomes more (less) in a person’s material self interest, the probability they pursue that action or behavior in the future increases (decreases).
AK says: “If there is no limit to the breadth of your definition, then “people act in their self-interest” is a tautology. It is always true, and that makes the statement uninteresting.”
But is this not the starting point from which Mises builds his theory of Human Action? Can an “uninteresting” axiom lead to such a rich theory as his?
Regarding charity and eschewing the assumption of ‘asymmetric insight’, another important concept is what CS Lewis called ‘Bulverism.’ Bulverism is the tendency of people (he especially attributed to Marxist and Freudian writers) to focus on explaining their why (in terms of class interest or psychosexual neurosis) opponents believed what they believed rather than engaging them. Needless to day this isn’t a purely academic phenomenon and it’s possible that the majority of ‘political discourse’ is just people talking or writing about why they think their ideological opponents think what they think. Resisting the temptation to be a Bulverist and just taking people’s motivations at face value, and focusing on engaging the substance of their opinions may be the important innovation to be made in modern political discussion.
Incidentally, coming up with intricate explanations for why your opponents believe X may be said to be the more charitable response sometimes. If you think X is preposterous, then explaining your opponent’s belief in it as a neurosis or in terms of self interest may seem more charitable than deciding they just believe X because they’re an idiot.
On the matter of ‘self interest’, I would actually argue that attributing a belief to material self-interest isn’t that uncharitable. I think of myself as a classical liberal and I would say my views are definitely self-interested, in the long run. I think a society with maximal individual freedom is a grand compromise; we each forfeit the right to (in accord with our self interest) steal from and murder others, while gaining the assurance that others won’t steal from or murder us. Of course, it may be in my material self-interest to favor a society in which I get to steal from others but not them from me, but once I accept this as unsustainable, the libertarian bargain seems like the best choice as far as self-interest goes.
Maybe this makes me a pseudo-Randian, but I think self interest should be viewed as a fairly constructive motivation and even in politics that everyone voting according to their personal self-interest likely yields better results than everyone voting according to what they think is in everyone else’s interest.
I repeat my previous comment on the supposed uselessness of subjective self interest:
The important distinction is between a tautology and an empty tautology.
Much of geometry is tautologous. Does that mean geometry is empty of insight? Certainly not.
It may be tautologous to say that “people prefer their own self interest” where “their own self interest” is whatever they subjectively desire, but it is certainly useful. Focusing on the subjectivity of costs and benefits dramatically increases economists’ ability to understand human behavior. Defining self interest narrowly, such that only objective costs and benefits are considered relevant is actually a step backward, even if it is more consistent with, say, the methods of physicists.