Huemer why people are irrational about politics

So I start with two examples; this is my first example of what I would consider political irrationality. Now, this graph shows the number of fatalities due to terrorism in the United States. The RAND Corporation has an excellent database of terrorist incidents, and so this is from their database. What you can see is there have been about 3, fatalities, this is just in the United States, over the course of about 50 years.

The blue is the people who were murdered by non-terrorists in the United States over the same time period — the last 50 years. Now, the other comparison that I think is interesting is comparing the costs of terrorism to the costs of war on terror.

So I have this on the next slide. Now, but that is actually only the tip of the iceberg as far as the cost of the War on Terror goes, so on the next slide, on the far right, these are the people who have been killed in foreign countries, most of them civilians. Protectionism is a policy whereby the government attempts to discourage foreign imports in order to protect domestic industries.

There are two ways they do this. The second way they do it is tariffs. This is where the government places special taxes on imported goods, the purpose of which is to drive up the price of the good in order to help domestic manufacturers. There are a lot of people who support this, both among the general public and among political leaders. Michael Huemer University of Colorado, Boulder. I look for explanations for the phenomenon of widespread, strong, and persistent disagreements about political issues.

The best explanation is provided by the hypothesis that most people are irrational about politics and not, for example, that political issues are particularly difficult or that we lack sufficient evidence for resolving them. I discuss how this irrationality works and why people are especially irrational about politics. Irrationality in Epistemology. Political Epistemology in Social and Political Philosophy. Political Theory in Social and Political Philosophy. Social and Political Philosophy.

Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy. Only published works are available at libraries. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals also tend to be the most partisan, and the strength of … Expand.

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Despite the widespread social harm that human irrationality causes, irrationality is not considered to be a social problem. This article explores why this is so, argues why irrationality is unlikely … Expand.