Reasoned Politics Quotes

“The truth is that a more reasoned approach to politics does not come easily, but nor is it impossible. Like literacy, it requires hard work and the right cultural circumstances. And there is reason not to despair completely: the scientific study of our political psychology and biases is still quite young, and its key findings are still to be widely disseminated. We have yet to turn this crucial self-knowledge into common knowledge, and to make it part of our culture. In particular, we have yet to see it change the perhaps most important aspect of our culture, namely our social incentives.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“It may be difficult for us to recognize that much of our epistemic brokenness is a direct product of our social and coalitional nature itself. After all, we tend to prize our social peers and coalitions, so it might be especially inconvenient to admit that they are often the greatest source of our epistemic brokenness — e.g. due to the seductive drive to signal our loyalties to them and to use beliefs as mediators of bonding, which often comes at a high cost to our epistemic integrity.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We think with our culture. That is, we rarely think from first principles, even first principles we ourselves sincerely endorse, but rather from sentiments instilled in us by our culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of humanity’s moral attitudes toward non-human animals. Even most utilitarians, who by their own ideals ought to consider the suffering of all beings important, are still in fact exceptionally anthropocentric in their attitudes. The insights of Darwin have not yet trickled fully into our moral consciousness, not even among those whose moral views demand it. Such is the heavy momentum of culture, which is reflected in every facet of modern politics and political thought. The anthropocentrism of most political philosophy is, to put it mildly, a massive failure.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Perhaps one of the best things we can do to entrench better values in our institutions and in society at large is to promote sentiocracy — working to gradually increase the concern for and representation of non-human beings in the political process, and thus to make sentiocracy the future of democracy.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The challenge of reducing suffering for all sentient beings can admittedly feel overwhelming. But the truth is that we can take real, incremental steps toward betterment and toward reducing the risk of worst-case outcomes. Our task is to ensure that we take the right such steps.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“This fact about human psychology may also be worth keeping in mind when others show a reflexively negative reaction toward us: they are not really reacting to us, but rather to their own negatively charged and unconsciously formed representation of us, which may indeed be an unpleasant cartoon figure to have to struggle with; a phantom struggle that merits both correction and compassion.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Many studies have demonstrated that we can change our minds when exposed to rational arguments, and that our initial opinions and prejudices can be challenged to a considerable extent.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Politics is broken. To say that this is a cliché has itself become a cliché. But it is true nonetheless. Empty rhetoric, deceptive spin, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. These are standard premises in politics that we seem stuck with, and which many of us shake our heads at in disappointment.

Yet it is not only our politicians who fail to live up to their potential. The truth is that we all do. Our reasoning about politics tends to be biased by an unconscious commitment to tribalism and loyalty signaling — yay our team, boo their team. That is, our political behavior is often less about promoting good policies than it is about the desire to see our own team win, and to signal our loyalty to that team. As a result, our conversations about politics often go nowhere, and they frequently go worse than that.

The good news is that we have compelling reasons to think that we can do better. And it is critical that we do so, as our political decisions arguably represent the most consequential decisions of all, serving like a linchpin of human decision-making that constrains and influences just about every choice we make. This renders it uniquely important that we get our political decisions right, and that we advance our political discourse in general.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“While it must be acknowledged that modern political systems work well in a number of ways, especially compared to those systems that wholly suppress civil liberties, it is also true that our political culture and ways of thinking about politics remain starkly underdeveloped and suboptimal in many ways. At the level of our individual thinking, collective norms, and the overarching cultural frameworks with which we tackle politics, there is great potential to do better.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“In short, our mission is to advance reasoned and compassionate politics for all sentient beings.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Given that our minds are the seat of all our beliefs and attitudes about politics, it is only reasonable that we make it a priority to understand the common function and pitfalls of our political minds, and that we seek to transcend these pitfalls rather than blindly allowing them to dictate our views.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The first steps toward motivated reasoning occur prior to conscious awareness, meaning that we often find ourselves on a moving train of motivated reasoning long before we can frame our first deliberate thought.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“In light of this unconscious self-deception, one could argue that the attitude we should ideally adopt toward our own motives is roughly the same as the skeptical attitude that we tend to have toward the claims of a politician seeking to get elected.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Giving equal consideration to all suffering will likely mean prioritizing non-human suffering on the margin, partly because non-human beings are so numerous, partly because their suffering is often extremely intense, and partly because their suffering is uniquely neglected — especially the suffering occurring on factory farms, in the fishing industry, and in nature; three of the biggest screaming elephants in the room of modern political discourse.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“There is, to be sure, a risk that interventions to help wild animals will end up making things worse, which highlights the importance of a well-informed and cautious approach to compassionate intervention. Yet this is very different from a stance of moral defeatism that simply dismisses the issue out of hand.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“... wild animals suffer from a wide range of harms regardless of their reproductive strategies, including hunger, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters. These harms often cause intense suffering, and we should not disregard this suffering merely because the sufferers happen to live in the wild, or because they happen to have non-human bodies. We rightly acknowledge a moral duty to relieve intense suffering experienced by humans, including when it is due to natural causes, and there is no justification for restricting this moral duty to humans only ... .”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The anthropocentrism of most political philosophy is, to put it mildly, a massive failure.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“... the reality is that we do not live in a world in which most people are strongly dedicated to the aim of reducing suffering for all sentient beings — at least not in terms of their actual behavior. However, most people probably are willing to support policies that reduce suffering if only the cost is sufficiently low to them personally, which suggests that a promising strategy for those who are most dedicated to reducing suffering is to tap into this vast reservoir of potential support, making marginal pushes in just the right places such that our efforts inspire broad support rather than broad hostility.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“... many authors have defended the moral and political
importance of reducing suffering, and hardly anyone has argued against it. Yet this view has nonetheless been largely ignored in the mainstream discourse within political philosophy, in large part, I think, because it lacks texture and has limited stickiness in our minds, unlike concepts such as justice and equality, which seem more intuitively appealing to most people.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The term “political overconfidence” should be at the front of our awareness in political discussions, and the political overconfidence we should each be most aware of and most eager to expose is, of course, our own.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The fact that genetic factors and personality traits can predict our political views is also a reason to be skeptical of our immediate intuitions. Rather than just reflexively live out a stereotypical personality profile in the political realm, we can rise above the dictates of our immediate intuitions — to reflect more deeply on our ethical values (the normative step) and to explore the complicated empirical question of how these values can best be realized (the empirical step).”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We do not need to completely transcend our biases in order for debiasing to make sense. Bias comes in degrees, and so even if we will always be biased in significant ways, we can at least limit the extent and influence of our biases — to be more skeptical of our immediate intuitions, to have more awareness of our tendency to engage in motivated reasoning, to show greater resistance against the pull of loyalty signaling, etc.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“The freedom of people to organize themselves as they want is just as important for curbing totalitarianism — and for addressing other problems — as is the freedom to speak up against these things. The freedom to use words is of limited value without the freedom to put action behind them.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“Intellectual openness is justified, indeed necessitated, by the fact that we are limited and fallible creatures. Nobody knows all the relevant empirical data and theories that bear on our decisions. Nor has anyone considered all the arguments that could be given for or against a given moral position. Therefore, we should be keen to have others inform us about the relevant facts, theories, and arguments about which we are currently ignorant, and which could potentially change our minds.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“It is challenging for the human mind to face up to the true horror of suffering, so much so that we seem to actively suppress its reality. Most of us tend to give little thought to the fact that we live in a world that contains suffering of inconceivable awfulness. And when we are confronted with the fact that such suffering exists, and that it does so in horrifically large amounts, we easily feel overwhelmed and tempted to disengage. Indeed, even most scholarly writings on moral and political philosophy seem to treat these subjects as though extreme suffering does not really exist.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“We have come to a point where we have developed and disseminated highly advanced technology, yet where our modes of ethical and political thinking still remain profoundly primitive, often not going much beyond immediate emotional inclinations. This is a dangerous combination. If we are to improve our politics, we will have to develop and disseminate better social technologies as well — norms and institutions that help make our political judgments better informed and more reflective.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics