How to Cure Self-Deception: An Augustinian Remedy

Many philosophers suppose at least some of our beliefs are products of self-deceptive thinking.¹ Yet the acknowledgment that self-deception occurs raises a worry rarely addressed in the contemporary literature: how can a person know that he or she is not self-deceived? Self-deceived persons routinely operate under the view that a belief or set of beliefs of theirs is true when in fact it is false. Self-deception, however, involves more than being mistaken about some belief. It occurs partly as a result of wanting something to be the case.² Understood this way, self-deception is a product of the agent's desire—particularly the desire that something be true in the face of contradictory evidence. What is worrisome about desires of this sort is not their potential to generate isolated instances of self-deception. The worry, rather, is that what people will or desire may produce patterns of belief formation that undermine their ability to weigh evidence, assess claims, and evaluate behavior (especially their own). If people's beliefs about themselves are shaped by unreliable doxastic practices, then how could they know whether they are self-deceived? Their self-understanding may be shaped by beliefs that are themselves self-deceptively produced.

Saint Augustine worries over a similar problem. Unlike many contemporary treatments of self-deception, however, his approach to the subject is circumscribed by his theological commitments. For Augustine, self-deception is a result of sin and its effects on the mind. Consider a passage that occurs in book ten of Augustine's Confessions . There, he notes how pride—manifesting itself as a love of others' praise and admiration—motivates his actions in covert ways:

For I cannot easily know how far I am clean from this disease [of pride], and I am in great fear from my secret sins—sins that Your eyes see, though mine do not. For in . . . other kinds of temptation I have some power of examining myself, but in this almost none.³

Augustine can combat most of the temptations to which he is vulnerable. Pride, however, presents a different kind of obstacle: it blinds him to the moral deficiencies of his choices and gives him an embellished sense of goodness. In short, pride makes him appear to himself better than he really is. Augustine acknowledges that he is vulnerable to pride's effects and asks God, "does this remain the real truth—that I deceive myself and neither think nor speak the truth in your sight?"⁴

Augustine appears to have the resources for addressing this worry. Earlier in book ten, he suggests that charity, or love for God, facilitates self-understanding by illuminating those desires and motivation that lie hidden in the human heart.⁵ This suggestion, however, is not one that Augustine explains in detail. Fortunately, he has plenty to say about charity in other texts. We can therefore go beyond the confines of the Confessions in considering how the appeal to charity might solve the problem of self-deception. Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas, who systematized much of Augustine's thought, illuminates charity's importance and explains its connection to other virtues crucial to self-understanding. I will draw from these sources in order to elucidate Augustine's view of charity and explain how it might solve the problem of self-deception as I have described it. I do not claim the proposed solution is precisely the view that Augustine held. I believe, however, his views allow for such a solution.

First, I will present Augustine's view of sin and its effects on our thinking. For him, self-deception is a kind of cognitive distortion resulting from sinful behavior. Any discussion of self-deception will therefore benefit from his account of sin and its cognitive effects. Next, I will discuss Augustine's view of self-deception in more detail, and then I will elucidate his view of charity and demonstrate its relevance to solving the problem of self-deception. I also will supplement Augustine's view by considering additional sources in which charity is a subject. In doing...