Ironically, analytic philosophers—armed with the Principle of Charity and Hanlon’s Razor—often fail to cut deep enough. Such heuristics—intellectually lazy shortcuts by nature—reflect the naivety of the Enlightenment thinker’s presupposition that all humans are, and ought to be, fundamentally good and rational.

Indeed, rather than exploring the vital forces that give rise to fallacies, contradictions, and inconsistencies, the analytic philosopher prefers to assume ignorance and replace it with a patchwork of charitable rationality.

“Critical” theorists—the most prominent opponents of these principles—are, today, the unfortunate and unworthy contenders against analytic philosophy’s tendency toward oversimplification.

Rather than delving beneath the surface of rational dialogue, the critical theorist cannot be bothered to employ “emotional labor” to understand opposing perspectives. Instead, dialogue must be framed in terms of whose identity intersects across the greatest number of oppressed classes, such that charity and understanding are granted exclusively to them.

Such types lack more than empathy; in their delusions of grandeur, they often laughably request payment to expend “emotional labor” on sharing their own decadent perspectives!

Tucked in the back pocket of the critical theorist is a Machiavellian razor: the assumption that ignorance, error, harmful outcomes—even seemingly innocuous reasoning—should be attributed to self-interest or deliberate malice.

As with most cowardly moralizers—and thus their blunt, reductionist razors—each camp hacks the world down to the scale of its own intellectual poverty, a desperate attempt to avoid the threat of real complexity.

In truth, for both camps, malice is nothing more than “the willingness to harm for self-interest”—they cannot imagine anything darker.

Yet will is more than mere self-service. Will is expressive, expansive—willing even to sacrifice the whole, if only to assert itself.

And if will is willing to sacrifice the whole, won’t it likewise produce contradictions, fallacies, and inconsistencies—if only to preserve itself?

What is needed, then, is not a razor nor yet another heuristic, but a scalpel: One should not rush to attribute rationality, ignorance, goodness, malice, or even self-interest to an argument, but instead examine the specific underlying wills striving to express and expand themselves through discourse.

In truth, any perspective can be rationalized and argued successfully. Accordingly, to avoid the convenient escapism of abstract detachment, I concede all rational ground to establish a shared, inhabited space. Then—scalpel in hand—I enter that space and claim the axiological territory.