Over the past few decades, psychologists have uncovered a great deal about why we keep listening to politicians. While there are interesting and clever evolutionary explanations for how these biases and heuristics helped our species in its phylogeny, psychologists are unanimous that, in most cases, these cognitive dispositions generally corrupt rather than aid our belief-forming practices. In Winning Votes by Abusing Reason: Responsible Belief and Political Rhetoric, Jamie Watson argues that the defects of human reason are such that neither deliberative democracy nor paternalism is a plausible solution to what is call the problem of political rhetoric. Further, this book argues that the problem, while contingent, is likely to be intractable, and therefore, the response should not be to attempt more political solutions, but to adopt individual principles of epistemic caution. While each of the extant solutions promises benefits for democratic processes neither helps citizens form responsible beliefs about politics. This book concludes by suggesting a starting principle for this project in order to open a dialogue about strategies to help protect our belief-forming behavior from the corrosive effects of political rhetoric.
