Self-Deception and the Moral Self

Self-deception is rife in moral thinking. Some have even argued that moral behaviour is fundamentally driven by self-signalling: we want to see ourselves as good, and we make use of self-deception to achieve it. What form does this self-deception take? A rough division is made between two sorts of account: the proactive, wherein the agent is seen as having in place a prior strategy to avoid unwanted knowledge; and the reactive, wherein the agent is held to initially register the unwanted knowledge before responding to block it. Refining this distinction takes us to the issue of whether there are ‘tension triggers’: states that serve to trigger a self-deceptive response that are in tension with the agent’s existing beliefs. The empirical literature does not conclusively show that there are tension triggers; but it provides plausible examples.