Self‐deception and moral interests

Adult persons normally are taken as prima facie authorities regarding their own avowed interests, so that an accusation of self‐deception with respect to such interests troubles our default presumptions. Furthermore, the difficulty, in practice, of knowing when such accusations are warranted presents a peculiar obstacle to moral justification, inasmuch as knowing how the interests of various persons really are likely to be affected by some act or norm is an accepted preliminary to moral justification across a wide range of theoretical approaches and is, in some cases—such as in contractualist accounts—decisive. I argue that a careful examination of the pragmatics of coherent allegations of self‐deception shows them to rely on a form of ‘proleptic’ argument, and that the truth‐ or validity‐conditions for such utterances lie in the transformative appropriation of the one so accused.