The excuses for irrationality often involve pointing out the quality of a persons' education. However, education has nothing to do with whether a person is rational. A person living in immense poverty who has gone a lifetime without a home and a formal education might be perfectly rational, and someone who has obtained multiple university degrees might be quite stupid. Education is no guarantee of intelligence, as brief contemplation reveals. If only the general public realized this!
There is no excuse for a person's irrationality, regardless of educational factors in that person's life. When someone starts making excuses for their own irrationality or that of another person, they are undermining the very basis for objecting to any errors of an intellectual or moral kind. They might not be aware of this. They might deny it. Yet the truth remains: since there is only arbitrary, blind belief in the absence of rationality, there is not a single error which cannot in some way be traced back to irrationality.
No one is without responsibility for how they use their intellects. Even those surrounded by horrendously flawed educational systems, taught misinformation and fallacies by their "educators," have no excuse for their own irrationality because reason is available even to people who have not received any education at all. As such, no one can legitimately say that they use fallacies because they were not educated properly. If no one needs education to possess or develop intelligence, no one can use lack of education or a poor education as justification for any irrational beliefs of theirs.
It is that simple.
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