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Self-Regulation and Political Confabulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2022

Kathleen Murphy-Hollies
Kathleen Murphy-Hollies*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the nature and consequences of confabulation about political opinions and behaviours. When people confabulate, they give reasons for their choices or behaviour which are ill-grounded and do not capture what really brought the behaviour about, but they do this with no intention to deceive and endorse their own accounts. I suggest that this can happen when people are asked why they voted a certain way, or support certain campaigns, and so on. Confabulating in these political contexts seems bad because we do not get a fully truthful account of why some political choice was made, and so the reasoning behind the choice is under-scrutinised. However, I argue that if people have a virtue of self-regulation, confabulation in political contexts can actually be part of the process of coming to better understand our political choices and embody more consistently the political values which we ascribe to.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 92: Values and Virtues for a Challenging World , October 2022 , pp. 111 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2022

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