This I Believe

I am a lawyer, a litigator to be exact. That means that I have spent a great deal of time in courtrooms over the last twenty years. The most common question that I am asked is, “How can you defend a criminal when you know that he is guilty?” The answer is that, in a very real sense, I do not know if that criminal defendant is guilty or not. I believe that the truth is always subjective. While I am confident that there is an objective truth about every situation, I am equally confident that such a truth is, ultimately, unknowable.

That does not mean that we must abandon our efforts to learn the truth. Humankind has been trying to understand the nature of matter for millennia. We have gone from atoms as simple particles to electrons, protons and neutrons. We then progressed to quarks, and now we have string theory. I am sure that string theory is not the final theory on the nature of matter, but that is not important. What is important is what we have learned along the way to developing string theory. Technology has progressed. We have learned enough to create nuclear power and cell phones and, as we continue in the futile struggle to learn all there is to know about matter, we will learn how to do even more.

In the same way, we have reaped the benefits of fairness, justice and due process from the development of our legal system. Not because the trial process is always accurate in determining who is guilty and who is innocent, but because of our struggle to develop a system that can do just that.

I believe that all we can ever do is approximate objective reality and strive continually to refine our approximations. Therefore, I believe that we must be humble about our opinions concerning the truth, because we will never know that our approximation is correct. We must treat the views of others with respect, because we have no more claim to the “real” truth than they do. We must strive to insure that the processes our communities use for deciding the truth are open to all points of view, since any of them could be true. And we must exercise extreme caution in imposing our perception of the truth upon others, whether it be by imposition of the death penalty, by the exclusion of certain scientific theories from our schools, or by the waging of a war, because the only ultimate truth is that we can be, and we often are, wrong.