It’s happened many times before, and people heard about it and aren’t that stupid or forgetful. They just want to believe something incompatible, so they permit themselves a little internal dishonesty: maybe it’s a separate issue that somebody else will surely figure out, or there’s a better solution (that we won’t pursue), or everybody always exaggerates (but we won’t verify that), or they find a way to hate and dismiss everybody who talks about it. Declaring your own shamelessness is more of the same: you’re reframing the problem from the consequences of your actions to your feelings about those consequences, then addressing only your feelings. It’s the same sort of behavior as heroin addicts, who find a route to happiness that doesn’t push them through the good things that the pursuit of happiness was meant to.