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The principle of charity requires interpreting an argument in its strongest, most reasonable form before evaluating or critiquing it. Rather than attacking a weakened version (the straw man), charitable interpretation asks: what is the best possible reading of this claim? Steelmanning — constructing the most powerful version of an opposing argument — is the extended practice of this principle. Charity is both an epistemic virtue (it leads to better understanding) and a dialogic one (it advances productive discourse). It does not mean agreeing; it means engaging with the real argument.
After reading an argument you disagree with, try to restate it in a form that would satisfy its original author. Show that statement to someone who holds the view and ask if it's fair. Only then proceed to critique.
From argument structure, you know that an argument is a set of premises offered in support of a conclusion — and that the same conclusion can be supported better or worse depending on which version of the argument you're examining. The principle of charity is the rule that before you evaluate or criticize an argument, you should identify the *best* available version of it. This sounds simple, but it runs against a strong psychological pull: when we disagree with a conclusion, we are tempted to attack the weakest, most easily dismantled version of the opposing view.
That tempting practice has a name — the straw man fallacy — and the principle of charity is its direct antidote. A straw man is a distorted, weakened version of an opponent's position constructed to make it easier to knock down. Charitable interpretation demands the opposite move: before critiquing, ask "what is the most reasonable and powerful reading of this claim?" This is sometimes called steelmanning — constructing the strongest possible version of an opposing argument, even stronger than the opponent may have articulated themselves. A good steelman passes the test of being something the original author would recognize and affirm: "Yes, that's what I was trying to say."
The principle operates at multiple levels. At the level of *ambiguous statements*, charity means choosing the interpretation that makes the argument more coherent, not the one that makes it trivially refutable. If someone's argument works on one reading but not another, the charitable move is to evaluate the reading that works. At the level of *missing premises*, charity means supplying the most plausible implicit assumptions rather than the most implausible ones. Both moves serve the same goal: ensuring you are engaging with the real intellectual challenge rather than a shadow of it.
Why does this matter beyond mere fairness? The epistemic payoff is substantial. If you can only defeat the weakest version of an opposing view, you have learned nothing — and your belief that you've won the argument is false confidence. By contrast, if you charitably reconstruct the strongest version and *still* find it flawed, your critique is genuinely powerful. You've located a problem that survives all the most sympathetic repairs. The principle of charity is not a concession to opponents — it is a quality control mechanism for your own reasoning, ensuring that your conclusions actually follow from engaging with the best available evidence and argument.
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