Philosophy & Critical Thinking: Steelmanning the position you reject

What you'll be able to do: Build the strongest version of a position you're inclined to dismiss, which in this subject isn't fair play, it's the methodological rule the whole discipline runs on.

Why charity is a rule, not a courtesy

In most argument, being uncharitable to an opponent is bad manners. In philosophy it's a methodological error, because Donald Davidson's principle of charity, formulated for interpreting any speaker at all, says: interpret an utterance so as to maximise its truth and rationality, because the alternative makes interpretation impossible. If you assume someone is probably confused, you have no way left to tell a genuinely confused claim from one you simply haven't understood yet, everything looks equally consistent with "they made a mistake."

Apply that locally and steelmanning stops being generosity. It becomes the only way to find out whether a position is actually wrong, or just badly stated by its worst defenders.

Worked example: moral relativism

The classroom version , "everyone's opinion is equally valid, who's to say", is barely defended by any serious relativist, and falls to one question: does that claim about validity itself apply relatively? If so, it can't be asserted as a universal truth, which undercuts the very sentence asserting it.

Herodotus records the actual shape of the serious version (Histories 3.38). Darius asked some Greeks what it would take for them to eat their dead fathers, as the Callatiae did, the Greeks were horrified. He asked the Callatiae what it would take to burn their dead, as the Greeks did, they were equally horrified. Herodotus's conclusion: "custom is king of all." The steelmanned relativist isn't saying nothing is really wrong. It's a metaethical claim: that moral judgements are true only relative to a framework, the way "large" is only true relative to a comparison class, and that this is fully compatible with holding your own framework's judgements with total conviction. That's a real position, argued seriously (compare J. L. Mackie's error theory, or Gilbert Harman's relativism), and it takes actual argument to answer, not a raised eyebrow.

Worked example: the Fifth Way

Aquinas's Fifth Way (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) is routinely dismissed with "who designed the designer", a one-liner that answers a different argument. That objection targets William Paley's 18th-century design inference: an eighteenth-century watch implies an eighteenth-century watchmaker. Aquinas's argument predates Paley by five centuries and isn't inferring a personal craftsman from complexity. It's arguing, from an Aristotelian metaphysics of final causation, that non-minded things acting toward consistent ends (an arrow flying toward a target) require some directing intelligence, because non-minded things can't direct themselves toward an end. Serious contemporary defenders (Edward Feser is the standard name) run the argument entirely within that older framework. Steelmanning here means, first, refusing to let a critique of Paley stand in for a critique of Aquinas, they are not the same argument, whatever the family resemblance.

How to run it

1. State the position and how confident you are.
2. Ask for its strongest form, as its most serious defenders actually argue it, not a balanced summary. Ask explicitly whether it's often confused with a weaker, nearby position you should distinguish it from.
3. Check the recognition test. Would a serious defender of the view accept this statement of it as fair?
4. Answer the single strongest point, not the case in general.
5. Ask whether your rejection depends on a premise the steelmanned version would also reject , sometimes both sides turn out to agree, once the caricature is gone.

I'm inclined to reject this position: [position]. Give me its strongest form, as its most serious defenders actually argue it, with their specific reasons, not a balanced summary. Tell me if it's often confused with a weaker, nearby position I should distinguish it from. Then ask me which single point I find hardest to answer.

Pitfalls

1. Polite strawmanning. A weak case stated respectfully is still weak. Run the recognition test.
2. Confusing a position with its worst popular version. The relativism example above is the standard case of this.
3. Steelmanning something with no serious case. Not every claim has one, and manufacturing strength is its own distortion.
4. Answering the case in general. Pick the single hardest point and answer that.
5. The tell: you can name the position and can't say which serious philosopher defends the steelmanned version, or on what specific grounds.

Try this today

Take the position your current essay argues against. Ask for its strongest form, and whether it's often confused with a weaker one. Then answer only its hardest point, not all of them.