Abstract
Research in moral, social and cognitive psychology undermines confidence in reasoning in representative democracies. Research seems to show that reasoning, especially in the political sphere, is not exploratory, but rather confirmatory, and that group identification bolsters such motivated reasoning. I argue that there are resources available in representative democracy that can be used to diminish the tendency to engage in confirmatory reasoning and group motivated thought, and so open a limited sphere where a significant degree of exploratory reasoning can occur.
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Notes
- 1.
F.A. Hayek argued that the social evolutionary views of Hume both pre-dated and influenced the development of theories of biological evolution. See F.A. Hayek, “The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume,” in Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. C. Chappell (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 356.
- 2.
The mandate is enforced by a penalty to be collected by the Internal Revenue Service when the individual files his tax return: 26 U. S. C. 5000A. The U. S. Supreme Court upheld the mandate as constitutional under the Taxing Clause, although rejecting the view that it was constitutional under the Commerce Clause: National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. ___ (2012).
- 3.
A clear account is provided in Ezra Klein, “Unpopular Mandate: Why do politicians reverse their positions?” The New Yorker, June 25, 2012, 30–33. Klein recounts work by Jonathan Haidt and others regarding motivated reasoning and groups.
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Henley, K. (2014). Motivated Reasoning, Group Identification, and Representative Democracy. In: Cudd, A., Scholz, S. (eds) Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02312-0_16
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