The Problems With Using Labels

Labels are helpful if we know both what is packed into the concepts or sets to which they refer and what isn't packed into them. For example, if I am searching for my fishing tackle box and I come across a box in the attic labeled "sports gear," the label helps me only if I remember what I earlier meant by the category "sports." If it includes only the gear from my interscholastic sports in high school--track spikes, baseball gloves, and shin guards--then my tackle box is somewhere else.

If I'm wrong about what the labels reference then I need to open the boxes and examine their contents. Otherwise, the labels might mislead me. And here's the first problem: I might think I know what the labels mean even if I am wrong in fact. Often, I don’t know what I don’t know.

Labels can guide our understanding, but only if we've already done the work of unpacking the box and examining its actual contents. Otherwise, labels stifle understanding and conceal from us the extent of our own ignorance. This principle applies to labels such as "Socialist," "racist," "homophobe," and "Marxist." They often give people a false confidence that they know what is in the box that they are labeling. (This was the basic point I made in my Fox News interview a few years ago.)

I’ve thought about this more in recent weeks as I’ve prepared to teach a course I’ve never taught before. Here in the United States, the course goes by the name “Conflict of Laws.” That label is idiosyncratic. Elsewhere in the world, the subject matter travels under the name “Private International Law.”

As I’ve prepared to teach the course, I’ve come to think that the American name for it is one of those labels that does more harm than good. (I’ve labeled my syllabus “Private Law Across Borders,” and have chosen a casebook that uses both of the conventional titles.) It defines the category of legal doctrines so that it excludes universal rights, customary rights, and rights created by private ordering. But those rights make up most private rights in the real world of legal practice.

The name “Conflict of Laws” predisposes law students to think (incorrectly) that law is primarily positive law or judgments, and that the laws of different states or jurisdictions will of course conflict. It thus deprives students of understanding. It also conceals from law students the extent of their own ignorance. They don’t know what they don’t know.

Labels in academic study are for this reason often more trouble than they are worth. In public discourse, the problem is even worse. Labels on boxes in the attic constrain our understanding of the set. But they don't affect our understanding of the items themselves. I may not remember whether I included "tackle box" in "sports gear," but I know what a tackle box is. By contrast, conceptual labels about beliefs and intentions can distort our understanding of both the set and its members. And that can lead us to think and act unjustly toward other people.

Human beings are not like tackle boxes and baseball gloves. What we are is determined in large part by what we choose to believe, intend, and do. A baseball mitt cannot make itself something that it is now not. But I can. If I believe that people should be defined by their race and I act on that belief, I come to be--I constitute myself as--a racist. Of course, I will deny that I am a racist. But my rejection of the label will not change the content of my character, what I, by my beliefs, choices, and actions, took into myself by acts of my intellect and will.

Conversely, to call someone a racist when they do not define others by race is to misunderstand not only what racism is, but also what that person is. It is act unjustly toward that person in our thinking about him or her. So, one problem with using labels such as “racist” or “Socialist” promiscuously is that we act unjustly toward ourselves. We impede our own understanding and deprive ourselves of the intellectual resources to distinguish real or central cases—the Klan, the National Socialist Party—from peripheral or non-cases—an Asian college applicant upset that she is disadvantaged by affirmative action, a liberal who wants to increase access to public welfare programs. Another problem is that we act unjustly toward others.

These are two of the most acute problems with our public discourse today. (1) We are more ignorant than we know. (2) And we defame each other, expressly or impliedly, with inexcusable regularity.