Search Results

This chapter tells the story told by an unmarried servant to a Leicestershire magistrate in 1608. Its ingredients include power and dependency, sex and violence, attempted abortion, attempted murder, suspected infanticide, and the construction of an exculpatory narrative. The story exposes the relationships of gentility and dependency, coercive male mastery and the vulnerabilities of female domestic service. Other topics exposed in the course of its unfolding include subterfuge and resistance, bribery and forgery, the misuse of literacy, and the threatened misuse of the law. The story even has religious dimensions involving the swearing of oaths, invocation of the Devil, recourse to the Bible, and a popular misrepresentation of the doctrine of predestination. The central character, Rose Arnold of Scraptoft, Leicestershire, told her story to her mother, to her minister, and to a magistrate, before retelling it, after much rehearsal, to the clerks of the diocesan court.

This chapter examines three primary issues raised by some of the conditions that are often assumed to be necessary for attributions of responsibility: first, that persons are largely ignorant of the effects of those acts which contribute to climate change and so cannot intend those effects, complicating the assessment of moral responsibility for them; second, there remains some uncertainty concerning the scientific basis of those predicted effects, further complicating attributions of responsibility for consequences about which persons may be ignorant; and third, the evident deception behind at least some widely disseminated climate skepticism further complicates the attribution of responsibility for ongoing emissions. It argues that unreasonable ignorance, in all three cases, cannot exonerate agents from culpability. Finally, it presents a defensible policy strategy for issues (like climate change) that are plagued by problems of uncertainty, endorsing the precautionary principle as well as means of “managing” uncertainty.

This chapter explores the nature of self and self-consciousness. The self is that which gives a person her identity as she herself sees it, and that means that she has sufficient complexity to be able to form intentions, to evaluate and select. Self-consciousness is itself constitutive of the self, and constituent of the self are consequently evaluations and decisions about what it is worthwhile to do and what to avoid, about the sort of life one wants to lead, and the kind of person one wants to be. The interdependence of the elements of the shape of experiences means that they will be ‘edited’, that some experiences will be seen as important and others as negligible according to how they fit into existing frameworks of beliefs and inclinations.

The view outlined thus far implicates a ‘high’ conception of beliefs and intentions on which those attitudes essentially involve reflective capacities, since the impact of our beliefs and intentions upon us is shaped by our knowledge of those very beliefs and intentions and of the normative commitments they incur. The view is defended through consideration of the phenomenology of belief and intention. There is a problem posed for the ‘high’ conception of intention and belief by the plausible thought animals lacking reflective capacities can have beliefs and intentions. The problem is addressed in terms of the idea that our (reflexive) believing and intending differs in psychological kind from any believing and intending on the part of non-reflective animals. A discussion of self-deception addresses an objection to the favoured view of intention deriving from the idea that we can unknowingly intentionally deceive ourselves.

Love attempts to restore broken bonds – our responsibility is to maintain and cultivate community. Reconciliation lacks the judicial sting of the category of forgiveness, but it nevertheless does not avoid the burden of confronting someone with the truth about their sin. Love does not entail self‐deception or deception of others.

Audi has suggested that the difference between self‐deception and delusion with respect to a false proposition turns on whether the subject believes the false proposition: the self‐deceived do not actually believe what they avow. But the chapter holds that the self‐deceived and the deluded both believe the false proposition, and so an account of the difference between self‐deception and delusion that differs from Audi's must be offered. The chapter discusses several standard cases of self‐deception, sketching his view of self‐deception as the product of motivational or emotional biases. It then considers three psychiatric delusions found in volume IV of the American Psychiatric Association's, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and argues that they are best explained not by the kind of biasing characteristic of self‐deception, but instead by the presence of cognitive deficits.

Audi addresses challenges to his views about intention, moral psychology, and reasons for action that are raised by Fred Adams (Chapter 12), Alfred R. Mele (Chapter 13), and Raimo Tuomela (Chapter 14) in Part III, “Intention, Self‐Deception, and Reasons for Action.”

This chapter examines cases in which political leaders and public figures told lies or engaged in deception as a pretext for fighting wars. The examples given here include William Randolph Hearst, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney. The chapter devotes particular attention to the case of Bush and Cheney and argues that they lied and attempted to deceive the public. Although this claim will strike many readers as obvious, it has not been adequately defended by those who make it. The journalists, public officials, and commentators who have accused Bush and Cheney of lying and deception do not offer careful definitions of lying and deception, much less a careful application of those definitions to the cases at issue. Certain features of my definition of lying are salient in these cases and help to show that Bush and Cheney lied and attempted to deceive the public – they strongly warranted the truth of claims that they knew were open to serious doubts. In most of these cases, lying and deception led to disastrous consequences and were morally wrong. However, the chapter argues that Franklin Roosevelt was morally justified in his lying and deception in order to aid Britain during the early stages of WWII. The chapter also discusses cases in which Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, and Dwight Eisenhower may have engaged in lying and deception in order to avoid wars. These also seem be to cases of justifiable lying/deception.

This chapter presents a summary of many thoughtful, persuasive, and articulate defenses of the practice of self-deception, and reviews forms of self-deception about which one should be ambivalent and wary. Although many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful, it is not good all the time. The discussion surveys the field of the many and various forms of self-deception, good and bad. It also gives a long and helpful list of what self-deception is not.

Setting aside his concern with political and theological principles, Milton's most distinctive contribution in culture is his poetry, where he thinks through the consequences of the principles in poetic language, which is more humanly complex than the combative polemics of his prose. This chapter examines Milton's thinking about the Fall of Man. His conception of the Fall is predominantly a meditation on egoism and disobedience, on selfishness and self-sacrificial love, on blindness and recognition. The chapter aims to elucidate some of the poetic means by which Milton draws his reader into the narrative of the Fall. Milton's poetry of the Fall is inter alia the fall of couples to individuals who enclose themselves in self-seeking forms of selfhood; and the fall of reason into modes of self-deception, exemplified by the recourse to the rhetorical questions that close off true reasoning and substitute human wishful thinking for the obedience to divine commands.

This chapter examines how flowers cheat visitors and other flowers. Pollination is not an altruistic exercise; there is a conflict of needs that makes both plants and pollinators liable to cheat to their own benefit. Deception is very common in pollination biology. For a plant, this essentially means getting pollinated and hence fertilized without giving up any reward or resources. This can commonly be achieved by resembling a rewarding species. For a visiting animal, cheating involves extracting nectar or pollen in ways that do not carry any pollen to another flower. The chapter discusses mimicry in flowers and aids to mimicry, including pseudoflowers, pseudonectar, and pseudopollen and pseudoanthers. It also looks at empty flowers as mimics and cheats before concluding with an analysis of mimicry of objects other than flowers, such as reproductive mimicry of brood sites and potential mates (pseudocopulation).

Deception can be defined roughly as intentionally causing someone to have false beliefs, but this definition needs to be qualified to deal with certain cases, including the following. I intentionally cause you to believe statement X and X is false, but I neither believe that X is true nor believe that X is false. The chapter also discuss several other cases that may require modifications of this definition and formulate several revised versions of the definition; the chapter counts cases in which people intentionally cause others to persist in false beliefs as cases of deception. There are two main differences between lying and deception. First, unlike “lying,” “deception” implies success. An act must actually cause someone to have false beliefs in order to count as a case of deception. Intentional false statements need not succeed in deceiving others in order to count as lies. Second, although a lie must be a false statement, deception need not involve making a false statement; true statements can be deceptive, and many forms of deception do not involve making statements of any sort. Thus, many instances of deception do not constitute lying. The chapter also explains the relationship between deception and the notions of withholding information, concealing information, “keeping someone in the dark,” “spin,” and “half‐truths,” and the chapter analyzes the relationship between lying, deception, and bullshit. Harry Frankfurt, to the contrary, suggests bullshit does not require the intent to deceive and bullshit can constitute lying. The chapter also argues that Frankfurt's famous claim that bullshitters, qua bullshitters, are unlike liars in that they are unconcerned with the truth (unconcerned with knowing “how things are”) is mistaken. As Frankfurt claims that unconcern with the truth is the essence of bullshit, this shows that his analysis of bullshit is mistaken.

Act‐utilitarianism implies that lying is morally permissible when, and only when, there is no alternative course of action open to one that has better consequences than lying. Many critics contend that utilitarianism is too permissive about the morality of lying. Mill attempts to answer this objection in Utilitarianism where he claims that lying always has indirect bad consequences (lying makes one less honest and undermines trust between people). Mill claims that, therefore, utilitarianism implies that there is a strong moral presumption against lying. The chapter defends Mill's argument and note two ways in which it can be extended and strengthened. First, there is another indirect bad consequence of lying that Mill does not mention – the difficulties that liars incur in trying to “keep their stories straight.” Second, in addition to the indirect bad consequences of lying (and deception), there are also direct bad consequences. We are (generally) harmed when we are deceived because we cannot effectively pursue our ends and interests if we act on the basis of false beliefs.

This chapter describes the wartime application of the intuitive intelligence mode in new domains, including policing, colonial administration, and military tactics. The intelligence strategy morphed from a means of gathering knowledge to a means of acquiring political control. As agents strove to fulfill their dreams of adventure in Arabia, they strayed into the realm of warfare, applying their expertise on Arab affairs to the use and theorization of irregular warfare, deception tactics, and airpower, all of which set the Middle East campaigns apart from the war of attrition in Europe. The official construction of Arabia as a “spy-space” where the expert agent knew how to meet cunning with cunning was central in the articulation of these tactics and underwrote the adoption of an avowedly conscienceless approach to involvement in the Middle East.