Akrasia

Image:Socrates Louvre.jpg

In Plato's Protagoras dialogue, Socrates asks precisely how it is possible that, if one judges action A to be the best course of action, why would one do anything other than A?{{Gutenberg | no= 1591| name= Protagoras| bullet=none}}

Plato's Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (Protagoras 358d).Plato, [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0178%3Atext%3DProt.%3Asection%3D358d Protagoras, 358d], Plato in Twelve Volumes, volume 3, translated by W. R. M. Lamb, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1967., accessed on 1 September 2024 If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal. An all-things-considered assessment of the situation will bring full knowledge of a decision's outcome and worth, linked to well-developed principles of the good. A person, according to Socrates, never chooses to act poorly or against his better judgment and, therefore, actions that go against what is best are simply a product of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good.{{Cite web |date=2024-07-26 |title=Akrasia and the divided will: The crisis of moral choice and the goal of human existence - 3 Quarks Daily |url=https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/akrasia-and-the-divided-will-the-crisis-of-moral-choice-and-the-goal-of-human-existence.html |access-date=2024-09-15 |language=en-US}}

Aristotle, acknowledging that we intuitively believe in akrasia, devoted book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics to a more empirical approach to the question.J. A. K. Thompson trans, The Ethics of Aristotle (1976) pp. 142, 66, and 89 He distanced himself from the Socratic position by arguing that akrasia occurs as a result of an agent's opinion, not of their desire. Since opinion is formulated mentally in a way that may or may not imitate truth, while appetites are merely desires of the body, opinion is only incidentally aligned with or opposed to the good, making an akratic action the product of opinion instead of reason. For Aristotle, the opposite of akrasia is enkrateia, a state where an agent has power over their desires.{{cite book|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/aristotle-ethics/#Akr|title=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|first=Richard|last=Kraut|chapter=Aristotle's Ethics|editor-first=Edward N.|editor-last=Zalta|date=14 July 2017|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|via=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy}} Aristotle considered one could be in a state of akrasia with respect to money or temper or glory, but that its core relation was to bodily enjoyment.Thompson, pp. 235–9 Its causes could be weakness of will, or an impetuous refusal to think.Thompson, p. 244 At the same time he did not consider it a vice because it is not so much a product of moral choice but a failure to act on one's better knowledge.Thompson, pp. 244–6

For Augustine of Hippo, incontinence was not so much a problem of knowledge (knowing but not acting) but of the will; he considered it a matter of everyday experience that men incontinently choose lesser over greater goods.Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology (1994) pp. 263–4

Donald Davidson (1917–2003) attempted to answer the question by first criticizing earlier thinkers who wanted to limit the scope of akrasia to agents who despite having reached a rational decision were somehow swerved off their "desired" tracks. Indeed, Davidson expands akrasia to include any judgment that is reached but not fulfilled, whether it be as a result of an opinion, a real or imagined good, or a moral belief. "[T]he puzzle I shall discuss depends only on the attitude or belief of the agent...my subject concerns evaluative judgments, whether they are analyzed cognitively, prescriptively, or otherwise." Thus, he expands akrasia to include cases in which the agent seeks to fulfill desires, for example, but end up denying themselves the pleasure they have deemed most choice-worthy.

Davidson sees the problem as one of reconciling the following apparently inconsistent triad:

• If an agent believes A to be better than B, then they want to do A more than B.
• If an agent wants to do A more than B, then they will do A rather than B if they only do one.
• Sometimes an agent acts against their better judgment.

Davidson solves the problem by saying that, when people act in this way they temporarily believe that the worse course of action is better because they have not made an all-things-considered judgment but only a judgment based on a subset of possible considerations.

Another contemporary philosopher, Amélie Rorty (1980) has tackled the problem by distilling out akrasia's many forms. She contends that akrasia is manifested in different stages of the practical reasoning process. She enumerates four types of akrasia: akrasia of direction or aim, of interpretation, of irrationality, and of character. She separates the practical reasoning process into four steps, showing the breakdown that may occur between each step and how each constitutes an akratic state.

Another explanation is that there are different forms of motivation which can conflict with each other. Throughout the ages, many have identified a conflict between reason and emotion, which might make it possible to believe that one should do A rather than B, but still end up wanting to do B more than A.

Psychologist George Ainslie argues that akrasia results from the empirically verified phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting, which causes us to make different judgements close to a reward than we will when further from it.{{cite web

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Richard Holton (1999), argues that weakness of the will involves revising one's resolutions too easily. Under this view, it is possible to act against one's better judgment (that is, be akratic), but without being weak-willed. Suppose, for example, Sarah judges that taking revenge upon a murderer is not the best course of action but makes the resolution to take revenge anyway and sticks to that resolution. According to Holton, Sarah behaves akratically but does not show weakness of will.

In the structural division of Dante's Inferno, incontinence is the sin punished in the second through fifth circles.{{cite book|last1=Durling|first1=Robert M.|last2=Martinez|first2=Ronald L.|page=178|title=Inferno|series=The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri|volume=1|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=Oxford|year=1996|isbn=9780195087444}} The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins,Dante, pp. 101–2 even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell.

Akrasia appeared later as a character in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, representing the incontinence of lust, followed in the next canto by a study of that of anger;Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queen (1978) p. lxiv and as late as Jane Austen the sensibility of such figures as Marianne Dashwood would be treated as a form of (spiritual) incontinence.Claire Harman, Jane's Fame (2007) p. 126

With the triumph of Romanticism, however, the incontinent choice of feeling over reason became increasingly valorised in Western culture.Mitcham, pp. 265–66 Blake wrote that "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained".Quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1971) p. 251 Encouraged by Rousseau, there was a rise of what Arnold J. Toynbee would describe as "an abandon (ακρατεια)...a state of mind in which antinomianism is accepted – consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice – as a substitute for creativeness".Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (1939) v5 p. 377 and p. 399

A peak of such acrasia was perhaps reached in the 1960s cult of letting it all hang out – of breakdown, acting out and emotional self-indulgence and drama.Jenny Diski, The Sixties (2009) pp. 120–1 Partly in reaction, the proponents of emotional intelligence would look back to Aristotle in the search for impulse control and delayed gratificationDaniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1996) pp. 80–83 and p. xiv – to his dictum that "a person is called continent or incontinent according as his reason is or is not in control".Thompson, p. 302

{{Columns-list|colwidth=30em|

• Aboulia
• Acedia
• Categorical imperative
• Disorders of diminished motivation
• Ego depletion
• Executive functions
• Marshmallow test
• Higher-order volition
• Procrastination
• Self control
• Velleity

}}

{{refbegin}}

• {{cite book|author=Davidson, D.|author-link=Donald Davidson (philosopher)|chapter=How is Weakness of the Will Possible?|title=Essays on Actions and Events|url=https://archive.org/details/essaysonactionse00davi_428|url-access=limited|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=Oxford|year=1980|pages=[https://archive.org/details/essaysonactionse00davi_428/page/n43 21]–42|orig-year=Essay first published 1969|isbn=978-0-19-924626-7}}

{{refend}}

• Dahl, N.O. 1984. Practical Reason, Aristotle, and the Weakness of Will. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Wedin, M. 1988. Mind and Imagination in Aristotle. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• {{cite book|author=Hookway, C.|chapter=Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Virtue|editor1=Fairweather, A.|editor2=Zagzebski, L.|title=Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility|url=https://archive.org/details/virtueepistemolo00fair|url-access=limited|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=Oxford|year=2001|pages=[https://archive.org/details/virtueepistemolo00fair/page/n183 178]–199|isbn=978-0-19-514077-4}}
• {{cite book|author=Schorsch, A.J.|title=Housing Policy and Common Sense: An Inquiry and a Method|edition=Thesis/Dissertation|location=University of Illinois at Chicago|year=1992|pages=85–90|url=http://www.sanityandsocialjustice.net/writings/AJSchorschIII_HousingPolicyandCommonSense_full_1992.pdf}}
• {{cite book|author-link=John Searle|author=Searle, J.R.|title=Rationality in Action|publisher=MIT Press|location=Cambridge|year=2001|isbn=978-0-262-19463-1}}
• {{cite book|author=Stroud, Sarah|chapter=Weakness of Will|chapter-url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weakness-will/|editor=Zalta, Edward N.|title=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|year=2008|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|edition=Fall}}
• {{cite book|author=Valverde, M.|title=Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|year=1998|isbn=978-0-521-62300-1|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/diseasesofwillal00valv}}
• {{cite book|author=Wegner, D.M.|title=The Illusion of Conscious Will|publisher=MIT Press|location=Cambridge|year=2002|isbn=978-0-262-23222-7}}

{{Wikiquote}}

{{Wiktionary|akrasia|ἀκρασία}}

• [http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/Akrasia/ "Akrasia"] by Seth J. Chandler, The Wolfram Demonstrations Project, 2007: An interactive computer model of akrasia based on {{cite book|author1=Cooter, R.|author2=Ulen, T.|title=Law and Economics|publisher=Addison Wesley|location=Boston|year=2007|edition=5th}}
• [https://messymatters.com/akrasia Akrasia and Self-Binding].
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20131031110153/http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/ Daniel Wegner's site] containing links to papers on conscious will and on thought suppression.
• [http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm Aristotle: Ethics and the Virtues (Weakness of the Will)]
• [http://nothingistic.org/library/aristotle/nicomachean/index.html#b7 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII]

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Category:Disorders of diminished motivation