Thread by @normative

A question I’ve been mulling today: How much difference does it make whether Trump believes his own lies, to the extent he can be said to have “beliefs”?

Normally we think it makes a big difference—the difference between an error and a lie, which in court cashes out as the difference between an innocent misrepresentation and a criminal fraud. But maybe this doesn’t quite apply in cases of suitably aberrant psychology...

Everyone is prone to various cognitive biases, including the propensity to believe claims that are self-flattering, or track what we wish were true. But imagine a person (resemblance to anyone living or dead, etc etc…) with what you might call a Fully Egoist Epistemology.

Someone with a FEE sincerely believes whatever outlandish claim is circumstantially convenient for exactly as long as it is convenient. They can tell the bank their house is worth $50 million on Tuesday, and the IRS that it’s worth $1 million on Wednesday, and fully believe both.

(This picture isn’t QUITE coherent, since they have to have some ground level beliefs—true or false—about what is circumstantially convenient, though maybe that resolves itself if you replace “convenient” with “psychologically appealing.")

Anyway, what should we think about the link between belief and responsibility in the case of the full epistemic egoist? Is a false belief exculpatory in their case, in the way it would often be for a normal person?

My own instinct is no: There’s a point at which having the disposition to be so predictably and self-interestedly self-deluded, to such an extreme degree, is itself culpable. It would be perverse to incentivize people to develop such characters with a get-out-of-jail-free card.

By analogy: We might excuse someone who caused a car wreck as a result of having been unwittingly drugged (normal error), but we have no sympathy for the person who habitually gets drunk before getting behind the wheel (FEE error).

All that said… it’s fairly clear that Trump at least sometimes knows he’s lying, so this is a thought experiment best taken, as they say, “seriously but not literally."