rationalize

While some react by abandoning the worldview entirely, many others find that rationalizing what went wrong is cognitively easier than admitting you, yourself, were the one who was wrong.

All these trends, especially when they layer on top of and reinforce each other, help create an atmosphere where violence against opponents is rationalized and politics becomes a game to win at any cost.

Yes, in the moment, they transcend our tendency to rationalize and victim-blame, and they get national attention by virtue of their terrible scale.

Prosecutor Raj Parekh dismissed the defense as retrospective attempts to rationalize Donald’s behavior.

It might be rationalized as a decision made by a consciously aware species, but it could also be seen as a direct, mechanistic extension of the efficacy of gene exchange and sexual reproduction in perpetuating the phenomenon of life.

Because as an actor, you have to rationalize his decisions constantly.

That conservative can always rationalize his actions—platitudes come cheap.

Let us not rationalize or attempt to justify an expulsion that in our hearts we know is wrong.

Rather than rationalize the tax code, or reform entitlements, the government has taken a cleaver to discretionary spending.

They rationalize away the facts, defend their position, and actually become more fervent.

It is at present a quite inexplicable story, and we give these preposterous facts with no attempt to rationalize them.

Nor, as a matter of fact, is it any more easy for the militarist to rationalize his method of solving world difficulties.

At present we give way to resentful passion, and then "rationalize" our surrender by calling it a vindication of justice.

I wanted her near my own size again as though the blessed normality of that would rationalize and lessen her danger.

It is more evil to "rationalize" the act—to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing.