Deliberate ignorance

Deliberate ignorance is the practice of refusing to consider or discuss logic or evidence disproving ideologically motivated positions. Examples include:

• Howard Dean, a physician, former Governor, and longtime politician, refusing to recognize that taxpayer-funded abortion increases the number of abortions
• refusing to acknowledge the inferior credentials of the critics of Richard Sternberg, whom they ostracize for having published an intelligent design article
• Democrats refusing to acknowledge Barack Obama's appeal to unpatriotic donors and supporters
• materialists refuse to address the impossibility of material explanation for migration and homing
• evolutionists refuse to address the lack of a plausible evolutionary path for the whale
• liberals refuse to address how socialism destroys productivity
• abortionists refuse to address the undisclosed harm to the mothers who have abortions
• Advocates of the global warming theory refuse to consider any scientific evidence which shows that natural causes have always had a greater effect on terrestrial air temperature than human activity.
• The claim that there is a verifiable link between Al-Quaida and Iraq, so we must invade, although all evidence points to the contrary.

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Common expressions of deliberate ignorance include:

• I'm not aware of that! (without admitting a failure to look)
• I've never seen that in the New York Times!
• That's not what it said in my (public school) textbook!
• Let's talk about something else!
• I'm not interested in that!
• They hate us for our freedom

Crime of Deliberate Ignorance

Deliberate ignorance can be a crime. For example, jurors were instructed "to consider whether ... former Enron Corp. executives deliberately ignored accounting fraud as the energy trader fell into bankruptcy."