The Fallacy of Sleeping With A Goat

by Nick Fortuna

I want to contrast with a lot of the answers we got earlier to the question of when we would be most aware of our own existence - the answer was often to the effect of our emotional highs: Major achievements such as getting in to a preferred college, or being immersed in your own passion.

I want to talk about situations where we forget, or even deny the "I." Appropriately, these are moments of shame.

There's a certain thought experiment my friends throw around as a joke that I brought up to a few people recently, and it goes like this: Would you rather sleep with a goat, and no one would ever find out, or would you rather not sleep with a goat but have everyone think that you did, with absolutely no hope of convincing them otherwise?

Now, it is a perfectly legitimate and defensible answer to prefer not to deal with the social consequences of having society think you shagged a goat, and to therefore just shag the goat. That isn't the fallacy here.
The answers I got though were subtly different, and, I believe, relevant to our class: If no one knows, then it's as if it never happened. The difference isn't very apparent at first, but we must look at the language. It is as if the event had never happened, not that it just doesn't have any consequences. It is, then, as if the existence is premised on an other's experience with that reality. One person even went so far as to say that they were basing their answer in Heidegger, comparing the act to a fallen tree that no one ever sees.
The fallacy here is quite simple - If you shagged that goat, then you would know, regardless of if anyone else does, and therefore the situation will have actually happened - but it would seem that there were a subconscious attempt to avoid that reality. It feels a bit like a stretch, but I say this because unless you deny the "I"'s presence at the act, then the argument that it may as well not have happened simply wouldn't feel sensible.


This happens in real life all the time: When people are at fault for something - and experiencing the shame of that - they try to deny accountability, or fault, or agency in the situation. They deny the self's presence (and therefore derivative things, like agency) to justify fault. For example, lawmakers deny having been involved enough with the cybercrime bill to have known about the libel clause, despite having discussed and voted on it.