In his book Self-Deception and Morality, Mike W. Martin characterizes self-deception as “the purposeful or intentional evasion of fully acknowledging something to oneself.” Among the characteristic ways of evasion he gives are keeping oneself willfully ignorant, systematically ignoring something suspected or believed, emotionally detaching oneself from what is happening, self-pretending, and rationalizing. Andre Gombay, reviewing Martin's book, questions whether self-deception is, as Martin suggests, adequately characterized as a complex of such activities. “When a head of state keeps himself in studied ignorance of what his underlings are doing; when (as perhaps he must) he pursues a conscious policy of not becoming emotionally involved in his decisions; do we say that he is fooling himself?” Gombay answers, I believe correctly, “No; we say this only if he also, in some sense sincerely, can deny he is behaving that way.” Gombay goes on to say that “It is all right to insist … that the self-deceiver acts consciously and deliberately; but not at the cost of omitting the other side – the false consciousness that coexists so precariously with the true.”

While I do not agree with Gombay that the self-deceiver's false consciousness coexists, however precariously, with the true, or that the self-deceiver acts consciously and deliberately, if this means that, knowing the truth, the self-deceiver consciously and deliberately gets himself to believe a falsehood, I do agree that the self-deceived's consciousness must be false. In this chapter I focus on this false consciousness.