A post by Neil Van Leeuwen

Straightforward action takes a familiar form:

Let my goal be getting cookies; let my belief be that cookies are in the cupboard; and (lo and behold) I get out my chair, walk to the cupboard, and open it. If my belief about the location of the cookies is true, then this action succeeds; if that belief is false (that’s not where the cookies are), it fails (it doesn’t result in getting cookies).

More generally, we act in ways that will achieve our goals, if our relevant beliefs are true. Following Davidson, many (if not most) action theorists add that the internal representations of the goals along with beliefs cause said goal-accomplishing actions.

Philosophers feel themselves on solid ground when proffering explanations in this form.

But I think many of us are on less solid ground when it comes to analyzing the mental causation behind actions that come with a pretext—where a pretext is (roughly) “a pretended reason for doing something that is used to hide the real reason.”

Beyond that plausible-enough definition, how do actions that come with a pretext actually work? It seems our analysis must have two layers: one to explain the pretending and one to explain the main action itself. And how do the two layers relate?

Let’s take Macbeth, who kills the king’s guards shortly after he murders the king, where his pretext for killing them is that they killed the king. Of course, the real reasons why he killed them are as follows: first, they wouldn’t be able to share evidence that would point the finger at him; second, he would seem righteous in his love for Duncan; third, people would consider the case closed. Of course, all that backfired, but we can still say that they were Macbeth’s motivating considerations.

Presented more formally, we have the following ostensible situation:

Belief (pretext): The guards killed the king.

Goal (pretext): Avenge the murder of the king.

Action consequence: Slay the king’s guards.

Macbeth’s deceptive pretense lies in representing himself as having that belief-goal pair as the motivator for his killing of the guards.

And we have the following “real” situation (of course, there is more complexity, but let’s set it aside for now to streamline the discussion):

Belief (real): The guards might reveal my guilt.

Goal (real): Cover my guilt.

Action consequence: Slay the king’s guards.

So action with a pretext is where one performs a non-pretend action that is actually motivated by one belief-goal pair, while also pretending to have done that very action with a different belief-goal pair. Otherwise put, the action consequence that is presented as having been done in light of the pretext belief-goal pair is the same as the action consequence that was in fact motivated by the genuine, underlying belief-goal pair (or belief-goal complex, etc.).

The point of such an elaborate action structure is social. An action that would be noble (or at least appear well meaning) if one had a certain belief (that one doesn’t actually have) and certain goal (that one doesn’t actually have) can serve to accomplish a nefarious goal (that one really does have), given certain beliefs (that one actually does have).

False beliefs often exculpate one of a given crime (“I didn’t mean to kill him…I thought those were the right pills”—if the latter clause is true, the speaker is exculpated of murder [though not of negligence]). So feigning false beliefs as a pretext, if the deception is successful, can also lower one’s culpability in the eyes of onlookers. Of course, the feigned pretext goal is chosen to appear as something that would be acceptable in the eyes of onlookers as well (“I wanted to give him his medicine”).

But there is something more to what is going on. In order for one to be able to guide the pretend layer of the action with a pretext, one must imagine having the pretext belief. Everyone reading this will leap to supply their own theory of what that amounts to, but let’s keep it general: I only mean by that that the pretext actor has some sort of imagined internal model of themselves as having the pretext belief.

But crucially, such an internal model will have emotional consequences that resemble emotional consequences that would have come from actually having the belief in question (or at least many of us so argue). Thus, if Macbeth has done the pretext imagining well, then his rage might be a case of genuine emotion—and carry all the signs with it. But we mustn’t confusedly think that the realness of the rage that gave Macbeth the fire to kill again implies the realness of the pretext belief on the basis of which he presents himself as having done it: that belief is an imagined belief only. If we confusedly infer the realness of the belief from the realness of the emotion, then we have just fallen for the pretext ourselves.

If I am more or less right in all this, it has a clear application to what is going on in our present political environment in the United States. Consider this passage from a recent New York Times piece concerning Republican “belief” that the 2020 election was illegitimately stolen from Donald Trump (bold lettering my addition):

Mr. Lindemuth’s victory in November in this conservative rural community is a milestone of sorts in American politics: the arrival of the first class of political activists who, galvanized by Donald J. Trump’s false claim of a stolen election in 2020, have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen.

Perhaps the attribution of the belief in question to Mr. Lindemuth is accurate, but perhaps not. But I think this passage is sloppy in its failure to take the possibility of pretext seriously. Perhaps it is true of some and even a great many, but it is unlikely that all 60 percent of Republicans who answer that way on surveys on this matter have a straightforward naïve factual belief that the election was stolen: seizing the reigns of elections processes would be a noble (or at least reasonable) thing to do, if one simply and straightforwardly believed that massive, systemic fraud occurred. So why not feign belief as pretext, along with inculcating in oneself the relevant rage through the adoption of the pretext belief? A trumped-up (pun intended) pretext/imagined “belief” can—via the usual routes of imagination—inflame real rage.

That rage will then give one the fortitude to do what must be done, just like it did with Macbeth.