Hanlon’s Razor
An MBA Toolkit Essential
Hanlon’s Razor is a philosophical razor, rather than a physical one (like that one above ☝️). As a philosophical razor, it is a heuristic or principle that allows us to discard (or ‘shave off’) unlikely explanations and instead focus on more likely reasoning.
Hanlon’s Razor
Hanlon’s razor proposes that we are best served by first assuming ignorance or incompetence rather than malice. It states:
“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Origins
In ‘Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!’ (1980) the razor is credited as a submission by Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
A similar statement is found in the work of similarly named American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. In Heinlein’s ‘Logic of Emipre’ (1941) he writes:
“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”
Other variations of this idea also exist, perhaps due to the prevailing utility of the razor in providing perspective to contentious circumstances. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is quoted as saying of France’s Charles De Gaulle that the latter’s “[insolence] may be founded on stupidity…
