This study examines whether volunteering for not-for-profit Organizations (NPOs) which are involved in providing social welfare services and which actively promote sociobehavioral factors like social responsibility, leadership, and self-confidence among its volunteers, reduces an individual’s likelihood of engaging in corrupt practices. We identify two psychological traits: propensity to rationalize (as evidenced by self-deception) and an external locus of control (as compared to an internal LOC) that facilitate unethical behavior. With the help of volunteers from two NPOs, we investigate whether engaging in social welfare activities organized by such NPOs would create awareness about the adverse consequences of corruption faced by large segments of the society, which in turn would make it difficult to rationalize unethical and corrupt acts. Additionally, most NPOs actively strive to develop self-confidence and leadership skills among its volunteers. Prior literature indicates that individuals possessing such qualities are more likely to have an internal LOC and also that individuals possessing an internal LOC are less likely to act in a corrupt manner. The overall results indicate that greater experience with such NPOs leads to a significant reduction in propensity to rationalize and leads to a higher likelihood of having an internal LOC.

What are wishful thinking and self-deception, and what is the difference between them? This article looks for answers to these questions with reference to a real-life case.

Our received theories of self-deception are problematic. The traditional view, according to which self-deceivers intend to deceive themselves, generates paradoxes: you cannot deceive yourself intentionally because you know your own plans and intentions. Non-traditional views argue that self-deceivers act (sub-)intentionally but deceive themselves unintentionally and unknowingly. Some non-traditionalists even say that self-deception involves a mere error (of self-knowledge). The non-traditional approach does not generate paradoxes, but it entails that people can deceive themselves by accident or by mistake, which is rather controversial. I argue that a functional analysis of human interpersonal deception and self-deception solves both problems and a few more. According to this analysis, my behavior is deceptive iff its function is to mislead; I may but need not intend to mislead. In self-deception, then, the self engages in some deceptive behavior and this behavior misleads the self. Thus, while it may but need not be intended, self-deception is never an accident or a mistake.

We suggest that overconfidence (conscious or unconscious) is motivated in part by strategic considerations, and test this experimentally. We find compelling supporting evidence in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others’ statements of confidence about how well they have scored on an IQ test. In two-player tournaments where the higher score wins, a player is very likely to choose to compete when he knows that his own stated confidence is higher than the other player’s, but rarely when the reverse is true. Consistent with this behavior, stated confidence is inflated by males when deterrence is strategically optimal and is instead deflated (by males and females) when luring (encouraging entry) is strategically optimal. This behavior is consistent with the equilibrium of the corresponding signaling game. Overconfident statements are used in environments that seem familiar, and we present evidence that suggests that this can occur on an unconscious level.

We aim to test the hypothesis that overconfidence arises as a strategy to influence others in social interactions. To address this question, we design an experiment in which participants are incentivized either to form accurate beliefs about their performance at a test, or to convince a group of other participants that they performed well. We also vary participants’ ability to gather information about their performance. Our results show that participants are more likely to (1) overestimate their performance when they anticipate that they will try to persuade others and (2) bias their information search in a manner conducive to receiving more positive feedback, when given the chance to do so. In addition, we also find suggestive evidence that this increase in confidence has a positive effect on participants’ persuasiveness.

The articles in this volume celebrate the work of Steven Burns. Versions of the articles were presented originally at two sessions organized in Burns's honour at the 2022 meeting of the Atlantic Regional Philosophers’ Association (ARPA), held at Dalhousie University in Halifax. This introduction presents a brief academic biography and summarizes each of the contributions. The articles, by Michael Hymers, Robbie Moser and Darren Bifford, Alice MacLachlan, Jason Holt, and Warren Heiti, address perennial themes in philosophy, such as self-knowledge, attention, friendship, interpretation, and judgement. The collection concludes with some last words by Burns himself.

I survey my career in philosophy, which encompasses 44 years of teaching in Halifax, but begins in London, England with a thesis on self-deception. I describe a practice of using works of literature as a guide to conceptual analysis, and pause in Vienna to translate On Last Things (Weininger, 2001). A line of Wittgenstein's is the basis for reflections on the concept of a Last Judgement. I discuss in some detail a paper of mine for the Atlantic Region Philosophers’ Association in 2018, “One Last Thing,” which takes as its basis The Sense of an Ending, a novel by Julian Barnes. I conclude with some claims about Wittgenstein's relation to religion. I add an Appendix, in which I comment briefly on each of the other articles that make up this symposium.

The suppression thesis is the theological claim that theistic non-belief results from culpable mistreatment of one's knowledge of God or one's evidence for God. The thesis is a traditional one but unpopular today. This article examines whether it can gain new credibility from the philosophy of self-deception and from the cognitive science of religion. The thesis is analysed in terms of the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist model of self-deception. The first proposed model views non-belief as intentional suppression of one's implicit knowledge of God. It is less feasible psychologically but has a good theological fit with Paul's and Calvin's versions of the thesis. This model also helps the argument for the culpability of non-belief. The second model views suppression as a process of subconscious motivated reasoning driven by a desire to avoid an uncomfortable truth. It fits Pascal's view that one's desire for or against God determines whether one sees general revelation as providing sufficient evidence for God. There is some empirical and anecdotal evidence for both models, but obvious cases of non-resistant non-belief present a major problem for the suppression thesis. Also, it is hard to see what might motivate anyone to deceive oneself about God's existence.

There are two main meanings in Kant’s concept of moral certainty (moralische Gewissheit, certitudo moralis): first, it applies to the kind of certainty embodied in rational faith in the existence of God and a future life; second, it applies to the conscientiousness (Gewissenhaftigkeit) required of an agent in the practice of moral judgement. Despite the growing attention to Kant’s theory of conscience and his concept of conscientiousness, this article is the first to discuss ‘moral certainty’ as the aim of ‘conscientiousness’ and to highlight the relevance of both notions in regard to moral education and the purposes of Kant’s ethical doctrines of method.

Saul Smilansky presents us with a puzzle which, in combination with a small number of premises, is supposed to generate a reversal of Pascal's wager: the wagerer should bet on a secular lifestyle, and reject religion, as the surest way of pleasing God (if God exists). In this article, we argue that the puzzle, once unpacked, isn't particularly puzzling, that the premises aren't true, and that Smilansky's wager is open to both reductio and a reversal of its own.

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties.

Both poor insight and depressive symptomatology are common features of schizophrenia that may be independent of positive and negative symptoms. Forty-six patients with DSM-III-R schizophrenia were evaluated for level of insight (schedule for unawareness of mental disorder), depression (Calgary depression scale for schizophrenia, Beck depression inventory), and self-deception or denial (balanced inventory of desirable responding). Patients with a greater unawareness of their illness had relatively less depressive symptomatology and relatively greater self-deception. This relationship was particularly strong for unawareness of the social consequences of having a mental disorder. These results suggest that the presence of depressive symptomatology in schizophrenia is related to the level of insight, and contingent at least in part on the absence of self-deception as a denial defense.

The self-deception debate often appears polarized between those who think that self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves (‘intentionalists’), and those who think that intentional actions are not significantly involved in the production of self-deceptive beliefs at all. In this paper I develop a middle position between these views, according to which self-deceivers do end up self-deceived as a result of their own intentional actions, but where the intention these actions are done with is not an intention to deceive oneself. This account thus keeps agency at the heart of self-deception, while also avoiding the paradox associated with other agency-centered views.

In my paper, I shall briefly explore a philosophy of performative speech acts, which is in line with Charles Taylor’s investigation into the human linguistic capacity. It complements the full shape of the linguistic capacity and gives an account of how reason enters thinking due to language. Language creates openness to reasons by, as I emphasize, means of a critique of self-deception, which could be accomplished by linguistic capacity.

Little extended attention has been given to Kant’s notion of self-conceit (Eigendünkel), though it appears throughout his theoretical and practical philosophy. Authors who discuss self-conceit often describe it as a kind of imperiousness or arrogance in which the conceited agent seeks to impose selfish principles upon others, or sees others as worthless. I argue that these features of self-conceit are symptoms of a deeper and more thoroughgoing failure. Self-conceit is best described as the tendency to insist upon one’s own theoretical or practical conclusions at any cost, while still wanting to appear – to oneself or to others – as though one is abiding by the constraints of theoretical or practical reason. Self-conceit is thus less centrally the tendency to impose one’s will or inclinations upon others, and more centrally the tendency to reconstruct evidence and rationalize so that one may be convinced of one’s own virtue. While the conceited agent may ultimately impose her judgement upon others, she does so in order to preserve her delusion of virtue.