Ethics

Do people have a moral obligation to be honest with themselves? Is there anything wrong with priming yourself with delusions in order to experience the bliss of ignorance?

Comments

I'm not sure that ignorance is bliss, but perhaps an extreme form of ignorance (in which you are ignorant of your responsibilities and duties) might lead to a life unburdened by any sense of duty or any call to do good. You are probably not going to aid those in peril or seek to contribute to the lives of those you love if you are completely ignorant of values. In any event, some philosophers have taken very stringent views on lying (especially Augustine and Kant) and they would hold that it is wrong to engage in lying with others as well as (if it is possible) with yourself. The reason for a slight qualification about lying to yourself is that it seems to involve a paradox: a liar needs to get the one deceived to believe something that the liar thinks is false. Deceiving oneself would then seem to involve a person believing something and not believing the same thing at the same time, an apparent contradiction. The paradox of self-deception to one side, there are dangers of what might be called being dishonest with oneself. Such dishonesty might undermine the very foundation for any coherent thinking. After all, if you cannot trust your own thinking, how do you even go about continuing to think and make decisions? I suppose you might simply trust someone else or some authority, but if you really don't trust your own thinking (that is, you are not honest with yourself), why think that trusting another person or some authority is good or worthy?

Two books you might consider: Ignorance by Peter Unger (he has some great arguments that we are all ignorant about reality --Unger later abandoned that position) and Paul Griffiths' book on Augustine on lying.

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