The Rise of Intellectual Vices in Politics

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I would say that things have certainly become more vicious In every sense in the last 10 or 15 years I mean so here's one kind of manifestation of this. Making false and unfounded and ridiculous claims is not only You know politically Acceptable it's actually politically effective. It seems as though, you know, plenty of plenty of voters No longer regarded as a fatal defect in their politicians that they talk nonsense Say things that are just plainly not you know that are plainly not true.

All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have been correct. Properties that systematically prevent us from being correct, and for which we can legitimately be blamed, are “intellectual vices.” Examples might include closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, overconfidence, selective attention, and so on. Quassim Cassam is a philosopher who studies knowledge in various forms, and who has recently written a book Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. We talk about the nature of intellectual vices, how they manifest in people and in organizations, and what we can possibly do to correct them in ourselves.

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Quassim Cassam received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He previously held faculty positions at Cambridge University and University College London. He has served as the president of the Aristotelian Society, and was awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.

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