Being Right and Being Kind

“When given the choice of being right and being kind”, the advice goes, “choose kind.” The self-proclaimed principle by itself may earn its position as one of those heart-warming maxims that deserve a well-decorated poster or a popular meme on the internet. Often, a wisdom that requires a lifelong of learning can be summarized into mere sentences, to the relief and benefit of many. Admittedly, the smallest platitudes can often prove to be true and convincing.

But not this time. Perhaps to the surprise of many readers of my blog, especially since I extensively wrote on kindness in the past, I still must assert that I heavily disagree.

The truth alone is the object of all human inquiry. All scientific and intellectual efforts uniformly aim at discovering what is right and distinguishing it from what is wrong. Be it science or mathematics, literature, history or morality, every domain of knowledge has its objective principles of correctness. The effort to discover what is right alone has guided humanity from its infancy to its intellectual flourishing we witness nowadays. Our history may as well be interpreted as a long struggle to overthrow what is wrong and to replace it with what is right — “right”, in this context, can be both in the intellectual or moral sense. To be right, or, at least, to try to be right, is the defining intellectual and moral duty of a learned personhood.

Yet all of this, whoever gave this advice claims, must be abandoned simply because the truth hurts someone’s feelings, or because the truth requires us to mean.

I do not deny the importance of feelings. In fact, I have dedicated one specific blog in regard to why we should not neglect feelings in the past. Yet sentiments alone cannot overthrow principles we hold to be right and sacred. If putting a smile on our face requires compromising truths or standards that have guided society since its inception, then that kindness is not only meaningless, but also intellectually pernicious and dangerous. To those who proclaim falsehood or whose deeds justly incur disapprobation, kindness to them is indifference to righteousness.

By being right, have I done a disservice to anyone? Perhaps, the principles that I stood up for may have made some uncomfortable, but does that discomfort undermine the merits of those principles? Moral issues aside, for mathematics and science, to be right is to offer true insights into nature; to be wrong is to pervert and distort the truth. Mere kindness for the sake of kindness, in this case, would be disrespectful against all of the human efforts that strove for the truth.

The value of being right, any lover of truth believes, would exceed that of being kind.