Motivated ignorance is a state of not-knowing that is cultivated or maintained by a person in order to serve their motives (i.e. their desires, interests, needs, or goals). While there has been a fair amount of work done by some feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race on cultivated forms of ignorance in general, a detailed account of motivated ignorance in particular has not been given. In my dissertation, I offer just such an account—examining both what it means for a person to not-know in the particular way that characterizes motivated ignorance and how this particular form of not-knowing is produced. I call my account a unified one because it asks both of these questions, while current accounts of ignorance generally only address either one or the other. The accounts of the feminist and critical race theorists mentioned above (who I call epistemologists of ignorance) usually focus on the latter practical question, while those of epistemologists who are neither feminist epistemologists nor epistemologists of ignorance (who I call mainstream epistemologists) only address the former conceptual question.In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I argue that it is not only possible to create a unified account of ignorance that combines the methodologies and insights of mainstream epistemologists and epistemologists of ignorance, but that it is beneficial for an account of motivated ignorance to be a unified one. I develop my two-part definition of motivated ignorance in the remaining chapters. In the third chapter, I argue that the state of not-knowing that characterizes motivated ignorance is best understood as one of agential insensitivity. This kind of insensitivity occurs when an agent's failure either to attend to relevant and available evidence, or to change their beliefs in response to this evidence, results in their beliefs not tracking truth or evidence. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I argue that in cases of motivated ignorance agential insensitivity is produced by an agent's motives exerting influence on their cognitive processes, especially when these motives are affective ones. Furthermore, since our motives are socially shaped, the production of motivated ignorance is a deeply social process even though it takes place largely at the level of individual cognition.
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