Please Keep Your Charity out of My Agency: Paternalism and the Participant Stance

This chapter addresses the question: when should one interpret another’s behavior through a causal lens, and dismiss it as a product of non-rationalizing forces? It argues against the view that we should do so whenever the resulting interpretation would be more charitable. Charity is not the appropriate principle, it is argued, because it can be paternalistic to interpret someone charitably. The same considerations that tell against acting paternalistically toward someone tell in favor of a strong default policy of taking what they say at face value, as an undistorted expression of their agency. The chapter argues that it is permissible to depart from this default only if there is a good reason to think that distorting factors are at work. This answer is taken to mirror the view in literature on the epistemology of testimony, according to which the correct epistemological norm instructs us that we can trust the testimony of others, absent positive evidence that they are not to be trusted. On this view we should take this default stance, even if the resulting interpretation is not the most charitable.