In this paper I speculate about the idea of personal moral discovery. These speculations occur, however, only at the end, for my object is to present genuine, not rhetorical, questions. The substance of this paper concerns moral weakness and self-deception. These topics are relevant because the analyses of moral weakness and of self-deception throw light, in different ways, on what is meant by and also on what obstacles there are to the discovery for oneself of a moral point of view.

Briefly the light they throw is this: self-deception is one sort of obstacle to self-knowledge. Insofar, then, as discovering a personal morality is the process of discovering something about oneself—and I merely assert for the moment that it is in part this—self-deception is one kind of obstacle to personal moral discovery. It may follow from this that the contrary process of detecting one’s own self-deceptions is one form of self-discovery which is relevant to moral discovery. If so, it will be important to be clear about how we do discover that we have been deceiving ourselves. I try to solve some of the difficulties there are about how this self-detection occurs in the second part of this paper.

The relevance of moral weakness to the topic of self-discovery is more complex. Again briefly, there are two main assertions which I make. The first is that any self-ascription of moral weakness is problematic. This is to say that the subjective evidence immediately available to the moral agent himself on any putative occasion of moral weakness is never sufficient evidence that he was, genuinely, morally weak on that occasion. We do not know, in other words, just from what is going on in our minds at the time, that our failure to act as we think we ought to be acting is moral weakness rather than something else.