Chapter Three - Sincerity in Thought

Summary

Introduction

A person can be responsible for an outcome, can be held to account for it, despite not having intended it or even foreseen it. The babysitter who brings her Rottweiler along with her and leaves it with the baby while she nips out to buy some cigarettes will be responsible for the baby’s injuries. She didn’t, let us assume, intend the dog to attack the baby. And she may well not have foreseen this outcome either, if that means foreseeing it as likely, since it might not have been a likely thing to happen, merely something made more likely by her absence. Let us imagine that she is asked, ‘Why did you leave the dog with the baby?’, and replies: ‘I assumed the dog would stay still for the short time I was at the shop.’ A question that arises about statements like this is whether they are fully sincere, or bona fide, or genuine.

In her article ‘On Being in Good Faith’, Elizabeth Anscombe (2008) discusses the phenomenon of insincerity in connection with issues of responsibility, voluntariness and so on. It might be thought that insincerity must attach to statements made to, or behaviour directed towards, other people; but, as Anscombe argues, sincerity and insincerity can be features of thoughts themselves. Indeed, a statement can be insincere on account of its expressing an insincere thought of the speaker, rather than on account of its not expressing the thought the speaker really has. One consequence of this for ethics is that when someone’s responsibility for an action or omission depends on the sort of account the person could truthfully give, e.g. in answer to such questions as ‘Why didn’t you do X?’, it is not enough that such possible answers not be lies – for the person may not know that her response is false or dubious, and so may not be lying. But in the case of insincerity, ‘not knowing’ doesn’t supply an excuse, as it might in other cases, but is itself a source of culpability.