introduction: Galeotti’s realist and realists for real

Political Self Deception is a fascinating study with at least two

important contributions. It is, in the first half of the book, a lucid
introduction to the complex and specialized philosophical debates
on the concept and paradoxes of self-deception, which advances its
own distinctive conception; and in the second half, a meticulous
application of this conception to international politics, vividly
demonstrating how self-deception can occur, and how – potentially
– we can stop it from occurring. As a political theorist without a dog
in the philosophical fight, I will leave to others to comment on
whether Galeotti’s conception of self-deception resolves the
impasse between the intentionalists and motivationalists. In this
short commentary, I wish to raise a different question: what is
political about political self-deception? Is it simply the general
conception of self-deception applied to political conduct, or is there
something distinct about how self-deception occurs, and how it
should be evaluated, in its political manifestation?
In exploring this question, I want to bring into play the figure of The
Realist, a character which makes several critical appearances in the
book. The Realist serves as a useful foil to Galeotti’s account in
these appearances, and the reader is no doubt supposed to identify
this cynical figure as the amoral, Realpolitik Machiavellian for what
he is. Yet the realist tradition, as defended in recent contributions to
political philosophy, presents a more sophisticated challenge. While
engaging with this tradition may not have been one of Galeotti’s
primary aims, I will contend that doing so illuminates several
interesting questions about, and potential problems for, the place of
political self-deception as an explanatory, moral, and normative
concept.1 In this short commentary, I aim to tease out these
tensions between self-deception and political judgement, the moral
evaluation of deception in democratic politics, and the normative
implications of Galeotti’s analysis.
Explanatory usefulness: self-deception and political
judgement

To set the scene, a brief introduction to contemporary political

realism is in order. In recent years, several theorists and
philosophers have developed a nuanced and sophisticated
approach to political normativity, which offers a more robust version
of the realist opponent than the one portrayed in Political Self-
Deception (Rossi and Sleat 2014; Sleat 2018; Sagar and
Sabl 2018). Risking over-simplification, this approach is a rejection
of the idea that the normative standards of personal morality are
applicable across contexts and practices, and more specifically, the
idea that political life ought to be regulated by abstract, pre-political
moral commitments. For realists, the political is characterized by
conflict and disagreement, unequal power relations, and the
inevitable presence of coercion and violence. The precise
relationship between moral normativity and political normativity is
contested even among self-described realists, but the gist of the
position is that politics is a distinct practice, and that normative
evaluations and prescriptions should arise from the particular
features of this practice. For a political actor to be guided solely by
the edicts of personal morality is not just a mistake, but a failure.
Working from within this position, we can turn to Galeotti’s
description of the first realist objection. In this objection, the Realist
is sceptical of the value of employing the concept of self-deception
to politics at all, arguing that ‘if we look at the false statements and
bogus information coming out from official sources in politics, we
can easily find explanations for them in terms of self-serving lies,
and self-interested desires to manipulate public opinion, dispensing
with all the puzzles and complications typically surrounding SD’ (p.
89).2
Contemporary realists pride themselves with being sensitive to
actual human psychology, against their moralist opponents’
idealization of moral agency. It will indeed be curious, then, if they
denied the existence of self-deception in politics. When reflecting on
the canon of historical thinkers commonly associated with realism,
not many do. Arch-realist Machiavelli, for example, warns in
the Discourses on Livy that ambition distorts the judgement of
political leaders, causing them to be myopic about the long-term
effects of their actions, or invoke easily debunkable ‘imagined
dangers’ as an excuse for extraordinary actions (Machiavelli 2009;
cf. Benner 2009; Bellamy 2018). Similarly, in chapter 23 of The
Prince, Machiavelli warns the reader of sycophantic advisers: since
humans by nature are prone to indulge in flattery, the wise prince
would seek the council of truthful advisers, enabling him to make
the prudent decision. This is not unique to Machiavelli: a recurring
theme of the realist tradition is to criticize their opponents for
refusing to view, or letting themselves be distracted from, the world
and its inhabitants as they really are – hence the name
(Edyvane 2019).
So how can we make sense of Galeotti’s suggestion that realists
think self-deception doesn’t matter? I suggest the answer may be
that, for realists, it only matters insofar it negatively impacts political
judgement. Simply put, political judgement is what enables agents
to answer the question ‘what is to be done?’ taking into account the
circumstances and particularities of the situation they are
facing.3 Whatever negative or positive effects self-deception might
have on the leader’s conscience, authenticity, or psychological
coping mechanisms, are irrelevant. In other words, self-deception in
itself does not matter. Note that in Machiavelli quote above, he is
interested in a particular kind of self-deception, which compromises
the leader’s judgement and thus makes him a bad ruler. President
Trump may well be delusional about his own ‘great and unmatched
wisdom’ – despite all compelling evidence to the contrary – but that
in itself is only worrying if it leads him and his administration to
ignore the risks and opportunities of political reality and make poor
decisions.
More radically, I think the Realist, along with the rest of us, has
reasons to be sceptical about Galeotti’s assertion that what she
describes as ‘self-deception’ necessarily entails poor political
judgement. If that were the case, the ‘Machiavellian politician moved
only by strategically astute scheme’ would always seek to avoid it,
at risk of ending up a confused and irrational agent (p. 84). But
political actors are not simply neutral assessors of evidence and
probability in the political landscape; they actively shape it by their
decisions and actions. As Raymond Geuss writes, the arena of
political action is a place ‘where the standards for evaluating what is
“success”, what is a good idea, what is a desirable outcome, are
themselves changing and always in principle up for
negotiation’(Geuss 2009, 42).
This distinction in function and agency is brilliantly captured by
Robert Jervis’s account of the inherent tension (and mutual dislike)
between decision makers and intelligence officers. As the political
world is at once ambiguous and uncertain, and one where decisions
have to be made in a compelling manner, leaders are not
necessarily irrational when pursuing a course of action against the
evidence-based advice of the intelligence agencies. The self-fulfiling
prophecy of over-confidence in future success makes some self-
deceived judgement politically correct. Jervis recounts the example
of Churchill in 1940 as paradigmatic: against the majority of his
cabinet tending towards peace with Germany following the fall of
France, and without any supporting evidence, he maintained ‘that
Britain could win because the German economy was badly
overstretched and could be broken by a combination of bombing
and guerrilla warfare’(Jervis 2010, 193). This was not the case, but
political fortune did not favour the advice of intelligence officers at
that time.
As the Realist suggests, then, we have some reasons to doubt the
explanatory value of self-deception in political theory, at least when
considered in itself. With this in mind, I turn now to questions of
moral evaluation and normative prescriptions.
Moral evaluation: deception in democracy and war

I mentioned above that realists wish to make a distinction between

the evaluation of personal conduct and political conduct. Galeotti
follows a similar line of thought. Unlike personal self-deception,
which main function may be directed at oneself, political self-
deception is always connected to the deception of others: ‘In the
political domain, leaders’ SD is transformed into other-deception:
like lies, it produces the effect of making the people believe
something that is false and that is in the interest of leaders to have it
believed’ (p. 89). Galeotti rightly points out that this feature of
political self-deception matters for the moral evaluation of this
phenomenon, undercutting its potential benefits for the self.
Moreover, she provides us with a useful typology of the relation
between self-deception and other-deception, distinguishing between
cases of (I) other-deception as a by-product of self-deception, (II)
self-deception as a means for other-deception (it is easier to lie
when you are self-deceived you are speaking the truth), and (III)
self-deception as a justificatory mechanism for explicit other-
deception. The moral evaluation of political self-deception,
therefore, hinges on the moral evaluation of other-deception.
However, this distinction between the personal and the political can
be interpreted more radically than it is in Galeotti’s analysis.
This question is brought to the fore in the discussion of the US
invasion of Iraq, and in particular the gap between the (supposed)
reasons motivating the attack and the way it was marketed to the
American public. The Realist is called to reflect on the normative
evaluation of dishonesty and deception in politics, and offers a more
or less consequentialist answer. As Galeotti presents this position,
‘politics in general, and foreign policy specifically, concerns the
pursuit of the national interest and is to be judged on the basis of its
effectiveness in achieving its goals; and, in doing so, it is inevitable
that some dirty hand problems arise and are met so as to grant the
political good at the expense of moral qualms’ (p. 198). Successful
military campaigns require both secrecy regarding the knowledge
and motives of the government, and (in democracies at least) a
broad national consensus, to be elicited by any means necessary.
Galeotti is critical of this democracy-undermining argument, and
offers two reasons to resist it. First, citing Stephen Holmes, she
argues that ‘the misguided disciples of Machiavelli forget that
circumventing democratic procedures may also deprive cabinets
and governments from the crucial reality test implied by check and
balances, adversarial democracy, devil’s advocates, and so on,
which also have the crucial function of hypothesis testing.’ (p. 198).
This objection sits somewhere between type I and III above, as self-
deception here is a result of other-deception. Call this the epistemic
objection. Second, Galeotti writes that ‘[c]ircumventing [the
democratic] procedure … is not a trivial detour from boring
bureaucratic rituals (as the realist would claim), but is the illegitimate
imposition of coercive measures by governments on citizens, who
are thus deprived of their agency capability’ (p. 200). More
generally, ‘If democratic legitimacy ultimately says that no
predicament should be coercively imposed by a lawful government
without the informed and free consent of the coerced citizens, then
war is the first and foremost locus where democratic legitimacy is to
be tested’ (p. 201). Call this the democratic legitimacy objection.
Both of these objections, presented in this form, seem overly strong.
With regards to the epistemic objection, I have already expressed
above some scepticism above about the place of certainty in
political judgement: the kind of mechanisms offered by Galeotti are
important, but do not exclude the place of judgement. More
prosaically, the role of devil’s advocate or partisan contestation can
be achieved institutionally without democratic control. A prominent
example from military practice is the Israeli ‘Tenth Man Doctrine’. In
1973, captured by what was later named ‘the concept of Arab
intentions’, Israeli intelligence failed to see the evidence of a pre-
eminent joint Egyptian and Syrian attack. One of the conclusions of
this failure was to establish, within the directorate of military
intelligence (AMAN), a designated unit called the Revision
Department, with the sole purpose of providing alternative
assessments of existing evidence.
Similarly, from a realist perspective, the democratic legitimacy
objection sets an implausible standard for legitimizing political
power. To reiterate the main point of contemporary realism, political
normativity is not applied ethics: what makes lying wrong in
personal ethics is different from what makes it wrong (if at all) in
politics. In the specific context of political power, coercion is a
central element. If political decision-making is legitimate only when it
enjoys the ‘free and informed consent’ of citizens, then no political
decision has ever been legitimate. The complications to this idea
are too many to recount. At minimum, consider the Humean
challenge, asking how can one freely consent to unavoidable state
coercion; the fact of political pluralism, undermining the idea that
‘citizens’ as a whole can consent; and the empirical realities of
political psychology, casting a shadow of doubt on the ideal of the
informed citizen. It is important to note that these complications
should not lead us to lose sight of the value of democratic
institutions; indeed, it is the impossible ideal of legitimacy as free
and informed consent that undermines trust in really-existing
democracy.
Perhaps this reading is overly literal, and explicit free and informed
consent is required only in cases of momentous decisions – the kind
of decisions Galeotti maintains are susceptible to political self-
deception (p. 80 and passim). She argues that the decision to go to
war, with the implied death, destruction and suffering it brings with
it, renders the question of democratic legitimacy even more urgent.
There are two potential explanations for this claim. First, the
threshold of acceptable justification rises in proportion to the risks
and costs involved in a particular decision: as war entails excessive
risk and costs to the citizenry as a whole, and to those in the armed
forces specifically, it certainly qualifies as one of these momentous
decisions. The second, more moralized explanation, involves the
political responsibility of citizens for what is done in their name:
‘[d]emocratic citizenship implies a sharing in the responsibility of
governmental decisions, which looks especially significant in the
case of war, where the government’s policy is then carried out by
individual citizens who will be the actual violators of basic morality’
(p. 200).
The two explanations above both assume that citizens bear the
brunt of war, expressed in either material or moral cost. But the
same democratic pressures that establish the requirement for
justification are also what undermine it. Most basically, the necessity
of the element of surprise at least partially counters the requirement
for public justification, as at least in some cases a public
deliberation on war would put more lives at risk. Furthermore, when
national armies become populated with professional volunteers,
fighting conducted by private military contractors, and killing done
by predator drones and laser-guided missiles, governments are
increasingly able to make war cost-effective and risk-free for their
citizens, and thus less in need of justification. Distanced from the
horrors of war, and protected from its consequences, citizens have
no incentive to be informed of it; on the contrary, knowledge and
explicit authorization would bring with it the burden of moral
responsibility, whereas ignorance affords plausible deniability.
The changing nature of war also brings with it a potential tension
between the epistemic and the democratic legitimacy objections.
The epistemic objection relies on the duty to act according to
accurate interpretations of reality; the democratic legitimacy
objection, on the duty to act only according to public authorization.
Yet simply put, we have no reason to think that the reasons which
are the best justification for engaging in war are also going to be
acceptable public reasons for engaging in war. If war is only justified
by some enlightened version of the national interest – the
preservation of political and territorial sovereignty and the protection
of fellow nationals – we may be excused in assuming a
convergence, as national armies are institutionally structured for
these aims. But if wars can be justified by cosmopolitan reasons –
the protection of human rights, for example – we inevitably face
what Cheyney Ryan calls the ‘cosmopolitan soldier dilemma’
(Ryan 2014; cf. Erez 2017). Insisting that normative reasons and
motivating reasons in this case must converge leads to tragic
results, where the failure of normative reasons to motivate leads to
inaction. Even the Second World War (the paradigmatic ‘just war’)
was not publicly endorsed in the USA on the basis of its best moral
justification, namely coming to the aid of Europe. Instead, President
Roosevelt’s administration engaged in covert operations, clearly
hostile to Germany and Japan, which plausibly prompted the attack
on American territory. It was only then, with the attack on Pearl
Harbour, that Americans were persuaded to publicly endorse the
war.4
So far I have been assuming that the gap between public reasons
and actual justifying reasons is the result of straight deception and
noble lies, where leaders sell the public on a message they
themselves do not really believe. The suggestion that even this can,
under some circumstances, be justified, is indeed controversial. But
if we go back to self-deception, our evaluation becomes murkier.
Take again Galeotti’s discussion of the decision to invade Iraq.
Importantly, she seeks to refute what she calls the ‘conspiracy
theory’ account, according to which political leadership knowingly
lied about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, and maintain instead that they
were self-deceived. Bush, Cheyney and others came to sincerely
hold the false belief that the enemy they were facing was state-like
(a straight case of SD, because it was preferable to the alternative),
and that the threat of WMD was real and eminent (a twisted case of
SD, this being the worst case scenario). They had other, perhaps
stronger reasons to see the invasion as a good decision (e.g.
Neocon ideology, the belief that Saddam was sponsoring terror), but
thought that the WMD narrative was the best way to convince the
public. Following this depiction, it is difficult to resist the unsettling
conclusion that their decision was factually mistaken, but not
morally wrong.

Normative prescriptions: assigning responsibility and

prophylactic measures
Beyond its contribution to explanation and moral evaluation,
Galeotti’s main argument for the value of self-deception is
normative. She raises two main normative questions, applicable to
the general concept and to its application to international politics
specifically. First, can the self-deceived be held responsible for their
own self-deception, and, second, can we prevent instances of self-
deception? Galeotti answers both in the affirmative. While I broadly
agree with her conclusions, I am sceptical about the way she arrives
at them.
In her conceptual account of self-deception, Galeotti stirs a middle
path between intentionalist accounts (whose view of self-deception
as intentional is paradoxical) and motivationalist accounts (who, in
their causal depiction of self-deception, leave out the question of
agency). Her innovative answer to the question of moral
responsibility is that, while the agent is not intentionally self-
deceiving, she did bring about the conditions that facilitated her own
self-deception. If she could have done differently, the attribution of
moral responsibility to her is fitting. To give a trivial example, if I am
negligent in replacing the batteries of my watch (causing it to be
slower), then I can be seen as having successfully deceived myself
about the accurate time, and can be held responsible for that. You
have every right, in other words, to be angry at me for being late.
But this does not easily translate to the political cases in which
Galeotti is interested. As she correctly points out, ‘the
circumstances of political decision making, when momentous
foreign policy choices are at issue, are blurred and confused both
epistemically and motivationally’, with miscalculation, uncertainty,
dishonesty and straight lying often entangled together. This is
further complicated by political decision-making being a collective
endeavour, where a collective agent (say, the government) may be
self-deceived even when none of its constituent parts is self-
deceived. In such cases, it is difficult in not impossible to trace the
responsible.5 Disentangling self-deception from its conceptual
cousins can only be done retrospectively, and even then this is
questionable: failed leaders have every incentive to present their
decision making as justified given the circumstances, and any
distorting features as elements beyond their control.
For these reasons, correctly identifying who was responsible for the
consequences of bad decision making, in the causal and moral
sense, will often prove impossible. Galeotti’s meticulous
reconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Gulf of Tunkin Affair,
and the Invasion of Iraq is a pursuit of the correct account of the
facts, which is essential for identifying the responsible. The question
of assigning responsibility, however, is importantly distinct from the
question of identification. ‘Unlike identifications’, David Miller
argues, ‘assignments of responsibility can be justified or unjustified,
but they cannot be correct or incorrect’ (Miller 2007, 84). There are
multiple contexts where we are justified is assigning responsibility
for a certain harm to a party that was neither the cause of this harm,
nor is blameworthy for it. My contention here is that political
decision-making is one of these contexts.
This is not a particularly novel argument: the distinction between
moral and political responsibility has been espoused repeatedly
from Weber to Walzer, from Arendt to Young. Galeotti herself
appeals to this distinction in support of her argument that self-
deception does not absolve politicians of responsibility (p. 109).
What I want to suggest is that the political responsibility of leaders
for disastrous decision-making does not depend on why the
decision was mistaken. This is especially true in cases of grand
foreign policy decisions – where, unlike other actions of the state,
the discretionary authority of lower-level bureaucrats is limited and
government most closely resembles a hierarchy. Galeotti rightly
argues that assigning political responsibility does not depend on
leaders’ good intentions (p. 109), and I think we can go further and
make the same argument about epistemic conditions. Political
leaders are responsible for the failures of their decisions and
actions, even if those decisions were ones that any reasonable
person in their position would have made, or were the result of
being duped by the deception of others. Political responsibility, in
this sense, is distinct from, and more strict than, moral
blameworthiness or legal liability. The harshness of this conclusion
simply reflects the inevitable burdens of political leadership.
It is important to add two caveats to this potentially controversial
suggestion. The first is that political responsibility does not,
obviously, preclude moral responsibility. If the disastrous decision
was driven by self-serving reasons, or that could have been easily
avoided, the political leader may very well be subject to moral
critique and sanction as well. The second is to notice that this model
of political responsibility can also be abused to end further probing
into governmental failures: Following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion,
President Kennedy publicly accepted the ‘sole responsibility’ and
objected to anyone’s ‘attempting to shift responsibility’ away from
him. As Dennis Thompson convincingly argues, this ‘ritual’ cut short
public inquiry into other officials’ responsibility for the failure, and
forestalled a public debate about the morality of the decision
(Thompson 1980, 907).
Galeotti similarly argues that simply admitting a mistake or finding
the party to blame for deception is not sufficient to prevent future
instances (p. 113). This leads us to her second normative
prescription, where she argues that political self-deception can in
fact be prevented or at least mitigated (p. 108–114). In the personal
realm, self-deception can be prevented by character development,
or by pre-commitment: I can make myself more aware of situations
where I am susceptible to self-deception, or I can find a reliable
friend to stop me when this is happening. Political self-deception
can be prevented in analogous ways: through the political education
of politicians and leaders to see themselves as responsible for
accuracy, and through institutional pre-commitments such as devil’s
advocates, impartial fact-checkers, and the like.
This of course seems very sensible, but I am not sure why Galeotti
argues that these prophylactic measures would not be efficient
deterrents for the two other causes of bad political judgement –
namely, straight lies and cold mistakes. Even if we grant that ‘lies
and mistakes can be detected only by hindsight’ (p. 109), that in
itself does not entail that they cannot be prevented or deterred.
Assuming that an independent body with the ability to check
decision-making is in place, it seems that it should be able to
counter falsehoods regardless of their origins, especially if its
institutional role is primarily to offer adversarial interpretations of the
facts.
Indeed, from the realist point of view, institutional constraints
(broadly understood) are all that is available to counter self-serving
or foolish decisions, whereas the moral education of leaders is
either redundant or impotent. Redundant, because if Galeotti is right
and I am wrong, leaders have self-interested reasons to avoid self-
deception; and impotent, because moral considerations alone would
not stop a politician intent on deception. Galeotti rightly
acknowledges this point, but sees institutional constraints as
secondary, ‘not meant to substitute the duty of politicians for moral
training against SD, nor to lessen their political and moral
responsibility and the related moral sanctions, but simply to
supplement moral reasons whose appeal is not always so strong’
(p. 113) I argue, conversely, that institutional constraints (with the
attached sanctions of political accountability) are the best and most
feasible educational tools we have in hand: if politicians are not
motivated to avoid self-deception by moral reasons, they will do so
to avoid being seen as self-deceived.

Concluding remarks

In this short commentary, I sought to provide a more robust

interpretation of the Realist’s objections to Galeotti’s conceptual,
moral and normative analysis in Political Self-Deception.
Importantly, this is meant as a sympathetic critique: As I hopefully
showed throughout, I believe that Galeotti’s account is able to
accommodate these objections, and in fact is built on broadly
‘realist’ presuppositions, charitably understood.
What I argued, however, it that at present Galeotti does not always
follow through on the full implications of these presuppositions. In its
role in explaining failures of political judgement, in its moral
evaluation, and its relevance to normative prescriptions regarding
responsibility and prevention, I think that some additional dosage of
realism with regards to political self-deception is called for.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano for the invitation to
participate in this symposium, and to Richard Bellamy and an
anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1 The distinction here between ‘moral’ and ‘normative’ is mine, and
not Galeotti’s. It is meant to capture the notion that not all normative
reasons are moral ones (e.g., there could be aesthetic, prudential,
or epistemic normativity). For the sake of argument in this
commentary, I will join the realists in assuming a distinct ‘political’
normativity. For further discussion and critique, see (Leader
Maynard and Worsnip 2018).
2 All parenthetical page numbers are to (Galeotti 2018), unless
stated otherwise.
3 For an excellent recent account, see (Philp 2010).
4 I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me refine this
example.
5 On this issue, see (Thompson 1980).
 Previous articleView issue table of contentsNext article

References
1. Bellamy, R. 2018. “The Paradox of the Democratic Prince:
Machiavelli and the Neo-Machiavellians on Ideal Theory, Realism, and
Democratic Leadership.” In Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory
and Practice, edited by M. Sleat, 38–47, New York, NY: Columbia
University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
2. Benner, E. 2009. Machiavelli’s Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
3. Edyvane, D. 2019. “Who’s the Realest?” European Journal of
Political Theory July. 1474885119864679.