Ethics & Global Politics (Dec 2020)

Political self-deception and epistemic vice

  • Neil C. Manson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2020.1853921
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 4
pp. 6 – 15

Abstract

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Galeotti argues that we can gain a better understanding of political decision making by drawing upon the notion of self-deception and offers a rich articulation of what self-deception is, and how and why it exerts influence upon political decision making, especially in high-stakes contexts where the decision seems to be counter to rationality. But such contexts are also explicable from a different perspective, with different theoretical resources. In recent years the field of ‘virtue epistemology’ has discussed a wide range of epistemic vices – traits of character, and cognitive strategies, that stand in the way of gaining knowledge. This raises questions about how an explanation of political decision making in terms of self-deception relates to an explanation in terms of epistemic vice. Because the notion of epistemic vice applies to self-deception and to other cognitive deficiencies, it is argued that the broader notion of epistemic vice might be explanatorily richer, and more useful.

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