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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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Self-Deception Unmasked
Alfred R. Mele
2001 Princeton: Princeton University Press.
pp. 148+xi. ISBN 0-691-05745-1 (pb)/0-691-05744-3(hb). £9.95 pb, £30.00 hb.
Practical Philosophy (Book Reviews) March 2001 Volume 4.1
Reviewed by: Trevor Curnow
The topic of self-deception is an important one for counsellors, and perhaps for philosophical counsellors in particular. Why, in the face of all the evidence, do people adopt and hang on to positions which range from the weak to the untenable to the outright perverse? The answer, according to Alfred Mele, is, at bottom, because they want to. This may seem neither profound nor surprising, and perhaps it isn’t. Nevertheless, there are enough people who disagree with Mele for him to devote substantial chunks of the book to taking detailed issue with them. For those not well-versed in the literature on the subject, these parts of the book are not always easy to follow, and can feel like more of a distraction from, rather than contribution to, the main argument.
At the heart of the argument (although Mele does not put it this way) is a desire to preserve, in an unproblematic way, the (psychological) unity of the self-deceiving individual. This is manifested in three different but related points. First, that self-deception is importantly unlike the deception of others. There is no need to ‘divide’ the individual in order to make self-deception coherent. Secondly, self-deception does not consist of people trying to convince themselves of things they know to be false. Thirdly, self-deception does not involve people believing something to be both true and false at the same time.
Instead of all this, Mele suggests that the key to understanding self-deception is the notion of a ‘motivationally biased belief’. We believe things that are false for all sorts of reasons, and self-deception is just one way of being wrong. In self-deception, we believe what is false because, for whatever reason, we want it to be true. Our desires shape our beliefs in all kinds of ways, making it more likely that we will believe one thing than another. They play a role in our generation of hypotheses, in our searches for evidence to test them, and in our interpretations of that evidence. At each of these stages our desires may gently but firmly push us in one particular direction rather than another. While that direction may seem natural to us, to others it may appear quite the opposite. Indeed, one of Mele’s tests for self-deception is whether impartial others, with the same evidence, would come to the same conclusion.
According to Mele’s model, then, rather than self-deception involving some act of will whereby a true belief is forcibly rejected or repressed in favour of a false one, it is more like a process which protects us from having to acknowledge reasons for believing that which we find unacceptable. Consequently, this book raises important epistemological concerns which extend far beyond the specific topic of self-deception. However, from the philosophical point of view, it is a pity that the conceptual analysis on which Mele embarks at the end of the book is so perfunctory. This seems to me to be an area in which a little more conceptual analysis might have helped to save a lot of wasted empirical effort. This reflects the general point that as a philosophy book it is perhaps too eager to be a psychology one.
Partly for that reason, philosophical counsellors may not find the book wholly to their tastes. However, there is much in it which is of use, and in particular the materials which deal with the concrete and insidious ways in which our desires may shape our beliefs. The better counsellors understand how clients come to hold beliefs which are inaccurate and unhelpful, the better placed they may be to help clients become free of them.
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