Amelie Rorty

(1932 - 2020)

We are well served, both practically and morally, by moral and ethical diversity. Moral deliberation requires the collaboration of distinctive perspectives: consequentialist, deontological, perfectionist considerations each contribute significant dimensions in determining what is good and what is right; virtue theory highlights the development of reliable ethical character

Many have said, and I think some have shown, that it is irrational to fear death. The extinction of what is essential to the self—whether it be biological death or the permanent cessation of consciousness—cannot by definition be experienced by oneself as a loss or as a harm.

There is more akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible.

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.