Can We Intentionally Deceive Ourselves?

When I deceive someone else, I know the truth but lead them to accept something false. Turn the deception on myself and a paradox appears: I seemingly have to know that a judgement is false while successfully believing it to be true. How, then, could intentional self-deception be possible?

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre presents “bad faith” as a way of fleeing our own freedom. His waiter performs himself as though he were nothing more than a fixed social role, as if “this is simply what I am” could remove every other possibility. Sartre is not proposing two people hidden inside one mind. He is describing a stance in which consciousness can disclose a choice while also obscuring it.

Contemporary debate takes two broad paths. Intentionalist accounts use a process over time or divisions within the mind to explain how someone can arrange their own false belief. Revisionist accounts argue that no explicit plan to deceive is required: desire can already bias attention and the handling of evidence. A founder who desperately wants a venture to succeed may remember a few compliments while repeatedly treating customer departures as exceptional. They may never issue the command “believe the business is healthy”, yet accessible counterevidence is processed in a consistently motivated direction.

My view is that self-deception need not be a single decision. It can be a series of motivated evasions. What separates it from an ordinary mistake is not merely a false conclusion, but the way desire keeps shaping inquiry. We cannot directly control every belief, yet responsibility grows as we actively avoid checks and repeatedly refuse contrary evidence.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-deception/
https://iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/