When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves

Something is seriously wrong. An alarming number of citizens, in America and around the world, are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. They believe that vaccinations cause autism. They reject the scientific consensus on climate change as a hoax. They think that hordes of criminals (murderers and rapists, in the words of some politicians) are invading the United States through its southern borders. They blame the emerging 5G network for the spread of COVID-19. A growing movement of conspiracy theorists under the banner of QAnon espouses the idea that prominent politicians and movie stars are involved in a cannibalistic pedophile ring. Meanwhile, so-called Birthers continue to insist that the presidency of Barack Obama was illegitimate because he was not a natural born citizen of the United States. At the same time, a shockingly high percentage of American citizens continue to believe that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election.

There is nothing to substantiate these beliefs, and easily available evidence shows that they are actually false. And yet, peopleoften educated, smart, and influential peoplecontinue to believe them. The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prizewinning economist Paul Krugman has called them zombie ideas: they continue to circulate despite being dead, disproven, and refuted. Even more troubling, the people who believe these things advocate for public policies that reflect their madness and vote for politicians who (whether they share those beliefs or not) promise to enact them. Especially remarkable is how these people come to hold beliefs and defend corresponding policies that, in fact, are contrary to their own best interests.

These are instances of bad thinking. Examples can be multiplied and internationalized. Elections, referenda, policies, and movements, not to mention actions both innocent and criminal, in numerous countries around the world, testify to an epidemic of bad thinking. Our focus, however, will be on the country we know best and the citizens among whom we live and work.

In this book we explain why bad thinking happens to good people. We consider why so many people can go so wrong in their beliefs and, consequently, in their actions. The way they come to form and defend these opinions is wrong, and their failure to appreciate the moral consequences of acting on them is wrong. The philosophical subjects of epistemology, which addresses how beliefs become justified and how knowledge differs from mere belief, and ethics, the study of the moral principles that ought to govern our behavior, can help us understand the difficult and perilous situation in which we now find ourselves. We also suggest a way forward, away from all this madness, through the tools of philosophyits questions, its methods, and even its millennia-old history of recommendations for how to lead a good, rational, and examined life.

A simple, if somewhat brutal, diagnosis of the current state of affairs in America is this: a significant proportion of the population are not thinking reasonably and responsibly. The real problem is not that they lack knowledge, education, skill, or savvy. Acting on incomplete knowledge or without the requisite skills can doubtless lead to disagreeable consequences. However, a person who does so might be blamelessmorally blameless, if she really could not have done otherwise, and even epistemically blameless, if she could not possibly have known better. We often have no choice but to act in ignorance of all the facts, the knowledge of which may be beyond our grasp, or when not adequately trained to meet a particular challenge. Similarly, we wish to distinguish what we are calling bad thinking from being unintelligent. Unintelligent people, who simply cannot figure out what to do or how to do it, no less than ignorant or unprepared people, might choose actions that end up doing more harm than good. But, like the ignorant or unprepared, unintelligent people might be blameless for their witless deeds. Few people, if any, are unintelligent by choice, and so blaming them for ill-conceived actions is often inappropriate.

On the other hand, bad thinking, as we understand it, is a character flaw deserving of blame. Unlike ignorance or lack of intelligenceand bear in mind that even very smart, capable, and highly educated people can think badlyit is generally avoidable. People who think badly do not have to think badly. They may beor, at least, should beperfectly aware that they are forming and holding beliefs irrationally and irresponsibly, and even doing so willfully. But they typically refuse to take the steps that would cure them of their condition. Some philosophers and psychologists have insisted that we really have very little control over what we believe, that the process of belief formation is not some voluntary process under the control of the will. Perhaps this is true for some of our beliefs, but it seems obviously