Topoi
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9608-7
Confabulation, Rationalisation and Morality
Anneli Jefferson1
© The Author(s) 2018
Abstract
In everyday confabulation and rationalisation of behaviour, agents provide sincerely believed explanations of behaviour which
are ill-grounded and normally inaccurate. In this paper, I look at the commonalities and differences between confabulations
and rationalisations and investigate their moral costs and benefits. Following Summers and Velleman, I argue that both can
be beneficial because they constrain future behaviour through self-consistency motivations. However, I then show that the
same features that make confabulations and rationalisations beneficial in some cases can also make them morally costly,
when behaviour is explained and justified through the endorsement of bad moral principles. I show that these effects are
most likely to occur where the central element of confabulation, self-explanation, and the central element of rationalisation,
self-justification, coincide.
Keywords Confabulation · Rationalisation · Sel-justification · Self-explanation · Morality
1 Introduction
When we confabulate, we sincerely report something that
we take to be true, but our claim is ill grounded and, in most
cases of confabulation, not in fact true. Some definitions
(Fotopoulou 2009) limit confabulations to memory distortions. Broader definitions “encompass any type of false or
unjustified belief” (Bortolotti and Cox 2009). Classic cases
of confabulation are inaccurate memory reports of past
events, or, more relevantly for the paper at hand, inaccurate
explanations for what we have done, where our explanations
do not link to the facts adequately. Whether these kinds of
confabulations are best described as false memories or as
inferences about past motivations need not concern us here.
Confabulation is by definition an epistemically problematic activity: individuals are unable to recall their past
actions and motivations but confidently make assertions
about these.1 When we confabulate, we lack knowledge
about our own past, but also self-knowledge, because we
mistakenly attribute certain past emotions, beliefs etc. to
ourselves (Strijbos and de Bruin 2015). The concept of confabulation has its original home in clinical cases, for example in amnesic patients. There is some debate on how broad
* Anneli Jefferson
a.jefferson@bham.ac.uk
1
University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
the notion of confabulation should be and what the relevant
differences between confabulation in the clinicial and nonclinical population are (Bortolotti and Cox 2009).
In this paper, I will only be concerned with a small subset
of non-clinical confabulations and rationalisations. I will be
looking at what Lisa Bortolotti calls ‘everyday confabulations’ (Bortolotti 2018), where agents give justifications for
behaviour which are normally false and insufficiently or not
at all supported by the evidence available to the agent. More
specifically still, I will be interested in moral rationalisations
and confabulations, instances where we give an explanation
for past behaviour by citing moral reasons for said behaviour, when the claim that these moral reasons were what in
fact motivated our action is not justified by the evidence. In
other words, the agent confabulates certain moral motives
when explaining their past behaviour. I will show both benefits and costs of confabulation and rationalisation, and argue
that rationalisations which are also confabulations are most
likely to have either a strong positive or negative effect on
future moral conduct. Whether the effect is positive or negative does not depend on the inaccuracy of the rationalisation,
but on the moral principles endorsed in giving it.
The paper is structured as follows—I first introduce the
notions of rationalisation and confabulation and ask whether
1
While confabulations are generally false, this need not be the case,
there is in principle the possibility that individuals accidentally come
up with a memory that is not false, but nevertheless only accidentally
represents the past accurately.
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we can draw a principled distinction between these two. I
will argue that while there are cases of pure confabulation,
where the main goal is self-explanation, and cases of pure
rationalisation which are only geared at self-justification, the
two phenomena often coincide.
I then turn to the benefits of confabulation. Summers
(2017) has recently argued that there are some benefits to
rationalisation and confabulation in the moral realm. I will
show that Summers is correct and—drawing on his work and
that of David Velleman—I will delineate the kinds of cases
where we should expect rationalisation and confabulation to
have beneficial effects on agents’ moral conduct.
However, I then show the flipside of these mechanisms.
While Summers focuses on the positive effects,2 I argue that
the same kinds of mechanisms can also lead to negative consequences. Rationalisation and confabulation can have considerable moral costs when they reinforce bad moral arguments and justifications. In some cases, when we explain
moral behaviour to ourselves and others in such a way as to
make ourselves look good, a central characteristic of motivated reasoning and cognition, this can lead to skewed moral
judgment: rather than adjusting our behaviour to our standards, we adjust our standards to our behaviour. The same
mechanisms of self-consistency and self-enhancement that
lead to positive results can have detrimental results. And,
importantly, it is not the fact that confabulations and rationalisations are false at the time of adoption or that they are
sometimes enlisted in order to retain a positive self-image
that makes them morally costly. Both of these features can
drive positive effects. It is only when they coincide with bad
moral justifications that things go seriously wrong. Finally, I
turn to the question whether confabulation is less susceptible
to this kind of problem, because it does not rely on the same
kinds of motivations as rationalisation. I conclude that it
is when confabulation and rationalisation coincide that we
will have the strongest effects, be they positive or negative.
2 Confabulation and Rationalisation
2.1 Introducing the Phenomena
In this section, I introduce the notions of confabulation and
rationalisation and explain important similarities and differences between them. The cases of confabulation I am
interested in for the purposes of this paper are ones where
we give explanations for our beliefs, decisions, or actions
which are not well supported by the available evidence and,
at least normally, untrue. Probably the most famous example
2
It is important to note here that Summers does not deny that there
may well be negative effects, they just aren’t the focus of his paper.
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comes from Nisbett and Wilson’s studies reported in a 1977
paper. In two studies, participants were asked to evaluate
the quality of different nightgowns or identical nylon tights,
and their choices were best explained by a placement effect,
they always evaluated the items furthest to the right highest.
However, when asked to explain their choices, they said they
had chosen the items of clothing because of their colour,
the superior knitting or similar (Nisbett and Wilson 1977).
Because the real reasons for action were not introspectively
accessible to participants, they confabulated an explanation.3
This does not mean that the reasons they confabulated were
random. They can be seen as a kind of inference to the best
explanation, where participants came up with explanations
which were plausible in the light of criteria one might well
apply when choosing items of clothing.
Similarly, there are cases of confabulation in moral judgment. In fact, Jonathan Haidt claims that moral reason giving
generally is confabulation, because the real drivers of moral
judgments are not the ones we appeal to when giving reasons
for our moral judgments. According to Haidt (2001), we
make moral judgments based on emotions, and the moral
theories we use to explain our judgments are confabulations.
He illustrates this with an example, where people are given
a vignette of a couple of siblings who engage in sex which,
according to the vignette, is a one off event which does no
psychological harm and does not lead to pregnancy because
they use contraceptives. Haidt points out that even though
general principles that would make incest wrong (for example risk of birth defects, risk of psychological damage) are
excluded by the way the example is constructed, people still
believe that the action is wrong and put forward these kinds
of reasons when justifying their judgment. When faced with
the objection that the general principles do not apply, they
are unable to come up with an alternative explanation for
the wrongness of incest in this particular case. According to
Haidt, they are confabulating an explanation for their moral
judgment, even though the real underlying reason is a gut
emotional reaction.4
A core feature of confabulation is that the correct explanation for our behaviour is not available to us. Things are
slightly different in cases of rationalisation, where alternative explanations may be available to the agent, but are
not endorsed. Haidt’s case is at the boundary between
3
Note that we can sometimes tell that an explanation is likely to
be a confabulation even if we do not know what the real underlying
reasons for actions were, because the explanation is supported by
obviously self-serving or biased reasoning. I thank an anonymous
reviewer for pointing this out.
4
Much more could be said about Haidt’s interpretation of the experimental results and whether they establish his general claim. For current purposes, it is sufficient that his interpretation gives us a model
of what confabulation in the moral realm might look like.
Confabulation, Rationalisation and Morality
rationalisation and confabulation, as ‘it just feels wrong’
may be an explanation introspectively available to the individual, but it is certainly not considered satisfactory.
Rationalisation is not just employed to explain a moral
judgment, it is also a common way of justifying past decisions or intended actions. This can be illustrated by the following example. I am set to meet a friend at the tube station.
On leaving the station, I walk past a beggar, who is sitting
out in the icy rain. I do not give him any money. I then see
my friend emerging from the tube; he stops and gives the
beggar money before he joins me in the doorway where I am
waiting for him. The contrast between our behaviour leads
me to consider why I did not give money. It may also lead
to cognitive dissonance, because it threatens my self-view
as generous and caring. In this situation, I might come up
with the following rationalisation: “I should not give money
to the beggar because he would just go and buy drugs with
it anyway. It’s got nothing to do with being stingy or uncaring.” What we have here is a rationalisation of my behaviour
such as to make it seem morally acceptable.
Rationalisations need not be moral rationalisations,
they can also be used to avoid the threat of seeming to be
irrational or violating prudential norms. So, for example, I
might rationalise the purchase of expensive shoes by saying
that I was not really being extravagant. as the shoes will last
longer and be worn more often than cheaper shoes, and are
therefore a good investment. Here, I am just trying to show
that I am meeting a standard for spending money in such a
way that it benefits me most, and thereby meeting a rationality standard in my purchase.
2.2 The Difference Between Confabulation
and Rationalisation
Let us now focus on the differences between confabulation
and rationalisation. At first glance, it would seem that rationalisation and confabulation are different in ways that are relevant to their epistemic and moral evaluation. Confabulation
is a response to ignorance, where individuals confidently
fill the gaps by either confabulating past events (memory
confabulations) or confabulating explanations for past or
present behaviour. While confabulation is generally understood as epistemically problematic because the confabulated
beliefs are unwarranted and normally untrue, confabulations
are attempts to avoid admitting ignorance, rather than being
attempts to avoid a certain truth that is in principle available
to us (cf Bortolotti 2018).
By contrast, rationalisation looks like an instance of motivated cognition. In motivated cognition, we reason in such a
way as to achieve certain beliefs that are subjectively desirable, or in such a way as to avoid subjectively undesirable
beliefs, or both (Hughes and Zaki 2015). For example, positive illusions, where individuals exhibit an unrealistically
positive self-image—also known as the better than average effect—(Taylor 1989), or have unrealistically positive
expectations for the future, are classic cases of motivated
cognition. In these cases of motivated cognition, evidence is
selected in a biased way, so as to reach certain subjectively
desirable conclusions. In the example above, we can see the
rationalisation of not giving money to the beggar working
in the following way: I want to avoid the conclusion that
my actions are uncaring and morally questionable, or even
immoral. I therefore recruit the thought that beggars often
use money to buy drugs as a reason to justify my action.
2.2.1 Self‑Explanation and Self‑Justification
One important thing to note is that rationalisation can serve
two purposes. In the case presented above, I can use the
claim ‘beggars use money they are given to finance their
drug consumption’ as a moral justification, without claiming that this was in fact the reason why I didn’t give money.
I could, for example, say, “The reason I didn’t give money
was because I was cold and it was inconvenient to dig out
my wallet in the rain. However, as it happens, this was also
the correct thing to do, because the beggar would have only
spent the money on drugs anyway, and I would not really
have been benefiting him.” Alternatively, and more commonly, I could claim that the justification of my action was
also my reason for acting the way I did at the time.
Summers characterizes rationalisation as providing the
agent both with a justification and an explanation for their
behaviour. “The rationalizer offers a justification of her own
action as if it were an explanation of her action.” (Summers
2017, p. S21) Self-explanation and self-justification often
coincide, when I explain my actions in such a way that my
explanation of my motivating reasons for action also justifies
that action. I may well not have thought about whether or not
to give money to the beggar, and only feel the need to access
and question my motivations when I see my friend giving
money to the beggar. But once I feel the need to explain my
behaviour, I explain it in such a way that makes sense of my
behaviour (self-explanation) while at the same time justifying it (self-justification). It takes a special kind of detachment to say “I didn’t give money because it was inconvenient, but as it happens, that is also the right thing to do.” It
seems to make the rightness of my action accidental, which
is something most people will feel uncomfortable with.
Nevertheless, in rationalisation, justification and explanation can, and in some cases do, come apart, as the above
example shows. Only when a rationalisation also serves the
purpose of self-explanation will it be an instance of confabulation. Focusing on the two goals of self-justification
and self-explanation, we can draw a preliminary distinction.
Confabulation primarily serves the purpose of self-explanation, whereas rationalisation is primarily concerned with
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A. Jefferson
self-justification. (Moral) rationalisation can be successful
even if it only serves the purpose of self-justification, selfexplanation is, as it were, optional.
By contrast, the kinds of everyday confabulation cases
we have been considering are best characterised as attempts
at self-explanation. In a recent paper, Coltheart (2017)
even argues that all confabulation, whether clinical or nonclinical, derives from a feature of human cognition that he
calls ‘the drive for causal understanding’. I take no stance
on whether this is true for all instances of confabulation,
including false memory reports, but it is almost trivially a
feature of confabulations which explain past decisions and
behaviour.
However, there is frequently also an element of selfjustification in confabulation. Successful self-explanation
does not just require there to be any kind of story, it requires
a story that makes sense of one’s behaviour and makes it
appear rational or moral. One wants to meet certain epistemic or moral standards when explaining one’s actions. ‘I
don’t know’ is not a satisfactory explanation for one’s behaviour, but neither is ‘I felt like it’ or ‘I was in a good mood’,
because these explanations (while they may actually be true)
do not really provide reasons, they are at most causes. This
is why the participants in Haidt’s study do not settle for ‘it
just feels wrong’ when explaining their judgment that incest
is wrong even in the carefully designed vignette they are
presented with.
Rationalisations can therefore at the same time be confabulations in cases where individuals are rationalising to fill
a gap and to explain their past behaviour to themselves. For
those who are unhappy with merging the concepts of confabulation and rationalisation in this way, an alternative way
of making this point is to say that some instances of sincere
but mistaken explanations of behaviour can be construed
either as rationalisations or as confabulations.
While self-justification plays a role in confabulation as
well, it seems at first glance that pure confabulation is, at
least from a moral point of view, less suspect than confabulation which involves rationalisation, because it is more open
to different kinds of explanations for behaviour. While the
individual does not want to admit ignorance with respect to
the reasons and causes for their decisions and actions, they
are not set on a certain explanation that makes them appear
in a favourable light, anything that makes sense of their decisions would in principle do. However, what makes sense is
plausibly constrained by certain rationality standards, which
then shape confabulations.
3 Moral Benefits of Confabulation
and Rationalisation
Summers argues that confabulation and rationalisation can
have moral benefits because they put pressure on individuals
to act consistently with self-ascribed motives.5 In what follows, I will focus on those rationalisations which also count
as confabulations because they arise from the need to fill a
gap in the person’s understanding of their own behaviour.
To illustrate the benefits of rationalisation, Summers also
employs the example of a beggar, but in the scenario he
describes, a person gives money to the beggar because they
are actually afraid of him. However, they do not access that
reason and rationalise that it is good to give to people in
need. This rationalisation, Summers claims, can have positive knock-on effects by putting pressure on subjects to act in
accordance with the self-avowed motive for action in future.
I now put practical pressure on myself—insofar as I
care about or am committed to being a reasonable,
consistent, and moral person who treats likes alike—
to defend this as a good reason and act according to
it in future cases, or at least to distinguish apparently
similar cases so that I can still claim to have consistent
motives. If I turn the corner and walk past yet another
person who appears similarly in need, I will feel some
pressure to do one of the following: give to him as
well, distinguish the cases (“This person doesn’t actually seem to be suffering”), or add some nuance to the
reason I previously endorsed (“... when I have extra
cash in my wallet.”) (Summers 2017, p. S29).
The idea that self-consistency motivations have a positive
influence on future action can be found in other writers as
well. Velleman (2000) stresses the importance of the selfconsistency motivation for making us behave in accordance
with certain traits or motivations we self-ascribe. In summarizing psychological literature on cognitive dissonance,
self enhancement, self verification and self consistency, he
says: “The research appears to show that we tend to act in
accordance with the motives and traits of character that we
perceive ourselves as having” (Velleman 2000, p. 362, 363).
Leon Festinger, the founder of cognitive dissonance theory,
also saw the need for cognitive consistency as a core human
motive (Gawronski 2012).
Self-consistency motivations and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance are known to drive rationalisations and
reinterpretations of past behaviour. In a famous experiment
by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), students were asked to do
a boring task (sorting spools) and were then split into three
5
Summers also lists meaningfulness as a further benefit of rationalisation, I will not discuss that issue here.
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Confabulation, Rationalisation and Morality
groups. The control group were debriefed straight away. One
experimental group was asked to introduce the task to the
next participant and claim that it was a lot of fun. They were
given one dollar for doing this. The second experimental
group was also asked to introduce the task and claim that
it was fun, but received 20 dollars as compensation. In a
debrief, it turned out that when participants were later asked
how enjoyable they found the task, the control group and
the 20 dollar group reported not finding it enjoyable, with
the control group reporting least enjoyment. The one dollar
group, by contrast, reported finding it enjoyable. Festinger
and Carlsmith explain this by saying that there is more cognitive dissonance pressure for the one dollar than the 20
dollar group, because the higher payment provides the 20
dollar group with a plausible motivation and explanation
for claiming the task was interesting. They therefore do not
have to reduce cognitive dissonance in the way the one dollar group does. Characterising the task as enjoyable can be
interpreted as an implicit rationalisation for doing something
that they have no obvious motivation to do.
But, importantly in the current context, consistency motivations also constrain behaviour looking forward. According
to Velleman, we act as we do in order to retain a consistent self-image. This consistency is crucial for us to make
sense of ourselves. The agent acts in accordance with an
existing self-image in order to know what they are going
to do (Velleman 2000, p. 366). In some cases of confabulation and rationalisation, this can have positive effects on our
behaviour, because we will try to act in ways that fit with
our image of ourselves as people who help those in need, or
people who are honest etc. These kinds of considerations
make it seem that rationalisations that construe our behaviour in a morally positive light are desirable, because they
will constrain our behaviour by making us want to act in
accordance with our professed motives and values. In the
quote by Summers above, we can see how professed reasons for action and moral commitments produce pressure
to act in accordance with these. This is also what cognitive
dissonance theory teaches us. In the study by Festinger and
Carlsmith, cognitive dissonance was reduced post hoc, but
it is also possible to preempt cognitive dissonance by acting
in accordance with the values we profess to have.
The effect of labelling on future behaviour extends to
labels others apply to us as well. Studies with children have
shown that labelling them as tidy has a more positive effect
on their tidiness than impressing on them the importance
of tidiness (Miller et al. 1975), and that telling children that
they are generous makes them more likely to behave generously in future (Holte et al. 1984). These kinds of findings
suggest that attributions of positive traits and motives will
influence behaviour in such a way that people will act in
accordance with these attributions, whether they are selfgenerated or given to us by others.
Self-consistency motivations are however not the only
forces at work when we try to live up to our professed moral
principles. Self-enhancement motives also play a positive
role in motivating individuals to live up to positive attributions. Thus, in the cases where others ascribe positive
attributes to individuals as in the studies cited above, one
motivation for acting in accordance with the description of
oneself as tidy or generous will be the desire to retain a
positive self-image. The children who are labelled as tidy
and then behave accordingly want to be able to apply positively valued traits to themselves and are therefore driven by
self-enhancement motives. A further motivation here may
be that we want others to retain their positive image of us,
so the motivation is one of wanting external approval rather
than internal consistency or validation. But these further
motivations are compatible with the hypothesis that others’
belief in us as, e.g. ‘generous’, reinforces that specific positive self-conception6 and thereby supports behaviour that is
in line with that self-conception. An important difference
between positive self-attributions and positive attributions
made by others is that the standards of what actually constitutes good behaviour are public in the latter case, whereas
the individual has far more leeway in the way they define
desirable behaviour when attributing positive characteristics,
motives or actions to themselves. I will return to this issue
in Sect. 4. However, in as far as agents do endorse moral
self-descriptions which commit them to specific values and
corresponding types of behaviour, such as giving to charity
regularly, visiting their friends when they are ill, not eating
meat because they care about animals, being a reliable colleagues who answers e-mails on time, these self-ascriptions
will put pressure on them to behave in accordance with their
self-conception from a self-consistency motivation. The
pressure to live up to our own rationalisations will be even
higher if these are made public, if we endorse them in front
of others.
These considerations suggest that rationalisations in
which we endorse certain moral values or principles as driving our behaviour will facilitate behaving in accordance with
moral values, as self-consistency motives and self-enhancement motivations put pressure on the individual to live up
to their professed values. Self-consistency will lead us to
act in a way that fits our existing self-image in order to help
us make sense of ourselves and the world. Our need for a
morally positive self image constrains our space of available
actions and motivates us to act in accordance with what we
believe to be right, so that we can maintain a positive moral
6
For example, Murray et al. (1996) found that when one partner had
an unrealistically positive view of their romantic partner, this tended
to affect the other partner’s self-image over time, which also became
increasingly positive.
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self-image. Clearly, self-consistency and self-enhancement
are only two of the factors that will be at work, so we should
not expect a perfect fit between self-professed values and
actual behaviour, but we should expect them to have some
constraining power.7
Furthermore, and more speculatively, our moral selfimage may have an indirect effect on what we feel morally
obligated to do. If we assume that ought implies can, then
being morally incompetent releases us from moral obligations. People frequently use their personal limitations, such
as for example illnesses, as excuses for not meeting moral
expectations others may have of them (Pickard 2011). This
need not be disingenuous. On the plausible assumption that
we cannot have moral obligations that we are unable to meet,
a self-conception as a person who does not care about the
well-being of others, or someone whose behaviour is driven
by addiction, makes an individual feel unable to meet moral
demands. This, in turn, will make them unlikely to try to
meet them. We therefore need to be able to tell stories about
our behaviour which emphasize our agency, rather than portraying us as compelled by forces such as addiction or disorder. Sometimes, a positive rationalisation or confabulation
will open up space for the adoption of certain motives for
action in a way that a more realistic self-assessment would
not. If we are concerned with the effects of rationalisation,
it does not matter so much that these rationalisations are
untrue at the time of adoption. What matters is that they
allow us to shape ourselves in a better way going forward.
Self-narratives which emphasize our moral failings risk
being self-defeating, by making it seem impossible to act
from moral motivations. This can range from extremely
determinist narratives which deny agency and moral capacity, to more mildly self-defeating views on one’s own behaviour. For example, when we accurately explain our own
behaviour to ourselves by saying ‘I did not give to the beggar
because I don’t much care about the plight of others’ or ‘I
did not stand up to the bully because I am a bit of a coward’
this may well be accurate, and we are not claiming that we
could not act from different, more moral motivations. But
it would probably be more beneficial for our future behaviour if we are less honest with ourselves. In some cases,
inaccurate self-reports which are instances of confabulation
or self-justification may actually be preferable in terms of
bolstering our moral agency.
7
Strijbos and DeBruin (2015) point out that we may have to manage
our behaviour in a number of ways by setting external incentives and
constraints to live up to our self-professed values. Avowal of these
values may not be enough, but it guides further steps we take to shape
our behaviour.
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4 Costs of Rationalisation
and Confabulation—The Distortion
of Moral Judgment
It is tempting to conclude from the above discussion that
we can confabulate and rationalise all we like in the moral
domain, and that as long as we end up with explanations
which justify what we do as moral, it will all be to the good,
because this allows us to become better persons. Unfortunately, this conclusion is unjustified. Put very simply, the
effects will only be as good as the moral principles the
rationalisation appeals to. What matters is not how accurately the justification provides the agent’s actual motives,
but how good the justification is in terms of picking out good
moral principles, i.e. whether it is an objectively good moral
justification and the individual would be morally justified if
this had indeed been their reason for action. This characterisation of course raises a further issue, which is whether there
are correct and incorrect moral justifications. Resolving this
question is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I will
just assume that we can get it wrong morally. As a working hypothesis, moral principles which do not generalise or
ignore the well-being of others should be rejected.
Not all instances of confabulation and rationalisation
that show us in a morally positive light are actually morally
defensible. Rather, rationalisations can attempt to justify
behaviour that should not be justified. Take, once again, the
example from the beginning, where I don’t give to the beggar
and justify this by saying that beggars spend all their money
on drugs anyway. This rationalisation of my behaviour is
also a rationalisation of not helping a certain subset of those
in need, beggars, in a certain way, by giving them money.
Leaving aside the question whether this is a justified moral
stance to take, it is clear that these kinds of rationalisations
can have a severely negative impact on our moral judgment
and decision making, because they provide a justification
for not helping others, in this case based on some empirical
assumptions about the likely effects.
The claim that not all moral self-justifications and rationalisations are defensible is hardly a novel one: Shakespeare
caricatures this kind of moral self-justification, in Julius
Caesar (Shakespeare 1988). In the play, Caesar’s killers
rationalise their murder, claiming that they are doing Caesar
a favour by freeing him from the fear of death:
BRUTUS
Fates, we will know your pleasures:
That we shall die, we know; ‘tis but the time
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.
CASSIUS
Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.
BRUTUS
Confabulation, Rationalisation and Morality
Grant that, and then is death a benefit:
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. (Act 3, Scene 1)
While this is not meant to be a psychologically realistic
instance of self-justification,8 it does illustrate something
important about the ubiquity and importance of the selfjustification motive. The urge to put a positive spin on our
actions that makes them appear acceptable is a strong one,
and it can influence our moral judgments. In a discussion of
self-enhancement and self-protection, Alicke and Sedikides
point to ways in which we alter our perception and interpretation of events when we cannot reach a positive self-image
by making changes in the external world: “When people cannot promote themselves objectively, they have recourse to
construal mechanisms such as reinterpreting the meaning of
social or task feedback, misremembering or reconstructing
events in a self-serving way, and making excuses for poor
behaviour or performance” (Alicke and Sedikides 2009).
Our moral compass is susceptible to being skewed by
mechanisms of self-justification, especially when we adjust
our judgments of what we deem acceptable gradually
through post hoc rationalisations. Existing standards can be
eroded in the attempt to find a post hoc or advance justification for unethical behaviour in a process of cognitive
dissonance reduction. Changes in our perception of what
constitutes acceptable behaviour can often take the form of
a slow slide down a slippery slope. We begin by justifying
a small departure from ethical conduct: “everyone lies in
a situation like that”. And once this type of behaviour has
come to be perceived as acceptable, more serious lies get
justified as not being so different from what one has already
declared acceptable, and so on.9 LaFollette remarks: “[t]
hinking that bad behavior will probably cause worse behavior is not surprising: it is precisely what one would expect
given our habitual natures” (LaFollette 2005).
It is interesting to note that these real-life slippery slope
events are relevantly different from empirical slippery slope
arguments put forward in ethical and policy debates, because
the first step onto the slope need not be perceived as acceptable. Rather, there are pressures which make this course of
action seem attractive (or less unattractive than the alternatives), and the moral evaluation is made to follow suit.10 We
do what we may initially believe to be wrong and rationalise
it post hoc. This leaves us with a more permissive approach
to a specific issue with the potential to become even more
permissive if there are further motivations to do what we
had initially believed wrong and we become habituated to
this kind of behaviour.
What I have just described gives us a mechanism how
self-enhancement motivations can lead to bad rationalisations. These in turn can reinforce bad behaviour by taking
moral pressure off the individual, who feels morally justified
in their action. If the behaviour is embraced or defended as
acceptable, it is likely to be reinforced by self-consistency
motives.
In his book on moral disengagement, the psychologist
Albert Bandura claims that ‘People do not usually engage
in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves
the morality of their actions’ (Bandura 2016). However,
people do sometimes spontaneously act in ways that violate
their moral standards. They also sometimes act in situations
that they do not yet have a moral standard for, because they
haven’t considered them from a moral perspective. I take it
that Bandura would not disagree, but rather, that his point
is that if we do consider the moral character of our action
before we act, we will find a way to justify it to ourselves
before we perform the action. But we do not always consider
the morality or the harmfulness of our actions prior to acting. Bandura’s 2016 book on moral disengagement is replete
with examples of planned action where agents rationalise
their behaviour as morally acceptable. Thus, for example,
he looks at the cover-up of child abuse within the catholic
church, citing church officials who justified covering up individuals misdeeds by appeal to the damage it would do to the
authority of the church if these matters came to light. These
types of justification can be, and have been, recruited either
before or after embarking on morally dubious behaviour.
In either case, they illustrate the downside of rationalisation. This can be rationalisation which is also confabulation, where we try to explain our own behaviour to ourselves
because we are genuinely trying to figure out our reason for
action. But it may also be pure rationalisations, where we
are trying to explain away unwelcome motives.
8
Note also that this is one of the cases where motive and (the caricature of) self-justification come apart, the motive for killing Caesar
was political.
9
Tenbrunsel et al. (2010) describe a similar scenario, where a consultant becomes habituated to overbilling their clients. At the start,
the amount is so small that it does not register on their moral compass and, incrementally, the amount of time the consultant charges for
become larger and larger.
10
In contrast, slippery slope arguments which are put forward in policy debates often assume, at least for the sake of argument, that the
action is considered is not problematic in and of itself, but will lead to
Footnote 10 (continued)
problematic consequences. For an overview on factors that influence
both empirical predictions and the likelihood of slippery slope events
occurring, see Jefferson (2014).
13
A. Jefferson
5 Conclusion
We find ourselves in rather an odd place. Following arguments by Velleman and Summers, I have shown that there
are possible benefits to rationalisation and confabulation,
and that they can have a positive effect on our moral conduct. I have argued that what makes rationalisation and
confabulation problematic—when they are problematic—
is not their falsity or lack of warrant, nor that they stem
from the desire to make ourselves appear in a positive
light. In fact, the self-enhancement motive can be a positive thing because it makes us try to live up to a desirable
moral self-image. If the explanation and justification we
give for our behaviour is one that embraces good moral
principles, such as being honest, helping those in need or
similar, they are likely to lead to good results. This is true
even if the self-ascribed moral motive, e.g. benevolence,
was not actually driving our behaviour at the time of action
and our explanation is therefore strictly speaking false as
an explanation of past behaviour.
What makes rationalisation problematic is the fact that
there can be rationalisations for an action which satisfy
the agent that their action is morally justified when it is
not, and allow him to adopt self-serving moral principles,
for example ‘We do not need to help the poor as they have
brought their plight on themselves.’ This has further negative effects by leaving the agent with bad moral principles
and making future immoral behaviour more likely via selfconsistency pressures.
Is this a danger which affects confabulation and rationalisation equally? I have argued earlier that where we have
a justificatory gap and the agent aims both at self-justification and at self-explanation, confabulation and rationalisation coincide. It is in these cases where there is a motivational element of self-justification in a confabulation that
the effects, be they positive or negative, will be strongest,
because the justificatory element is at the forefront. This
means that these cases of rationalisation involving confabulation are more likely to lead to positive or negative
effects. If we adopt a rationalisation that is incorrect but
reinforces desirable moral values, this is good for our long
term moral development and conduct, even if it shows lack
of self-knowledge at the time. If we come up with a rationalisation that justifies immoral behaviour as moral, then
this is bad for us as moral agents, because it will lead us
to continue behaving in that way.
By contrast, there can be a confabulation which explains
our behaviour to us without at the same time justifying
it. In fact, we may think that our behaviour was unjustified. For example, I may refuse to loan a friend who
needs money for a business venture money and, in a selfaccusatory mood, think this is because I have always been
13
slightly envious of them and their entrepreneurial spirit. In
reality, however, I am just worried about my own finances
and the possibility of suffering financial loss. Because I
have not tried to find a moral justification for my behaviour, be it an objectively good one or a misguided one,
there is no consistency-pressure for me to act up to a specific moral principle I endorse.
Frequently, the need for self-explanation and self-justification coincide, especially in cases of moral confabulation and rationalisation. But to the extent that confabulation is primarily geared towards self-explanation, it is less
likely to affect moral agency to quite the same degree as
rationalisation.
Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support of Hope
and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations, a funding
initiative by the Templeton Foundation for a project entitled ‘Costs
and Benefits of Optimism’ [Grant ID 46501]; and the support of the
Leverhulme Trust for the project Mental Disorders, Brain Disorders
and Moral Responsibility [ECF-2015-493]. I have presented some of
the ideas in this paper at the Society of Applied Philosophy Annual
Conference and at the LSE Rational Choice Group and received helpful
feedback. My thanks also go to Lisa Bortolotti, Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs,
Kathy Puddifoot and two anonymous reviewers at Topoi for their comments on earlier drafts.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Research Involving Human and Animal Participants This article does
not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed
by any of the authors.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativeco
mmons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate
credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the
Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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