Two Cheers for Bias

I once shared an article defending gun rights with a friend. She told me that the author ‘seemed biased’. She did not engage with the article’s arguments but instead dismissed the article entirely on account of its writer’s apparent bias.

What would an unbiased argument look like, exactly? Many anti-bias advocates would say that an unbiased argument, or theory, or worldview is one that blindly absorbs all of the data on offer and comes to the only sensible conclusion.

For one thing, there’s no such thing as blindly absorbing data. There is an infinite amount of data, and how one chooses to splice it depends on their preconceptions. Why do criminologists, for example, categorize criminals by age and not by an infinite number of other possible categories, such as blood type, or size of birthmark? It is because criminologists have theories about which variables may explain crime and which are entirely irrelevant (they can be mistaken, of course).

Secondly, people disagree about which conclusion is the most sensible. One criminologist may conclude that young men commit more crime than old men because young men are ‘obviously’ more driven to aggression by a storm of hormones, while another may conclude that it is ‘obviously’ because old men have greater wealth and therefore more to lose.

So there is no getting around choosing between possible data sets with certain preconceptions in mind, and there is no singular conclusion that all witnesses of said data will reach.

But surely it is better, say the anti-bias advocates, to not blindingly insist that some idea is true. I agree! But their gripe is with dogmatism, not the existence of biases. Dogmatism is indeed always a mistake—we ought never insist that any idea is certain to be true and/or beyond criticism.

The solution to the existence of problematic biases is not the removal of all biases but rather a robust tradition of criticism. Biases are just ideas, and some will contain more truth than others. So long as we are free to criticize them and offer alternatives, then we our ideas can evolve towards ever greater fidelity to the truth.

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If a bias is wrong, let its opponents explain why and offer a better bias in its place. And if it is right, may we all be so lucky to be so biased.

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