The Nature of Self-deceit and the Origin and Use of General Rule

⁸⁸ The impartial spectator does not always need to be far to pervert our judgments on our own conduct.

When he is near, the violence and injustice of our own selfish feelings are sometimes enough to induce the man within the breast to make a report very different from what our real circumstances can authorise.

⁸⁹ There are 2 occasions when we examine our own conduct:

1. When we are about to act

2. After we have acted

Our views tend to be very partial in both cases. But they tend to be most partial when they must be impartial.

Self-Reflection Before an Act

⁹⁰ Before we perform an act, our feeling’s eagerness will seldom allow us to think about what we are doing.

We might want to see things as how other people see them.

But the fury of our own feelings goes against this.

It constantly calls us back to our own place to get a distorted view of things, arising from self-love.

We only get short glimpses of how those objects would appear to others.

These glimpses:

• vanish in a moment, and
• are not altogether just

We cannot even for that moment:

• divest ourselves entirely of the heat* from our situation, and
• consider what we are about to do with complete impartiality.

Self-Reflection After an Act

⁹¹ We can enter more coolly into the indifferent spectator’s feeling when:

• the action is over and
• the feelings which prompted it have subsided.

What interested us before is almost now as indifferent to us as it always was to the impartial spectator.

We can now examine our own conduct with his candour and impartiality.

But our judgments now:

• are often of little importance compared to what they were before, and
• can frequently produce only vain regret and unavailing repentance.

It does not always secure us from similar errors in the future.

Our opinion on our own character depends entirely on our judgments on our past conduct.

It is so disagreeable to think bad of ourselves.

We often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable.

They say that a bold surgeon has hands which do not tremble when he performs an operation on himself.

A man is often equally bold if he pulls off the veil of self-delusion which covers the deformities of his own conduct from his own view.

Rather than see our own behaviour so disagreeably, we often foolishly try to exasperate those unjust feelings which misled us.

By artifice, we try to:

• awaken our old hatreds, and
• irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments.

We even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose.

We thus persevere in injustice, merely because:

• we were once unjust, and
• we are ashamed to see that we were so.