Akrasia and self-control

Abstract

According to Gary Watson (1977), if we choose not to implement a judgment about what it is best to do then we must have changed that judgment. On those grounds he rejects an otherwise plausible account of akrasia, or weakness of will, that explains it in terms of the relative strengths of the agent's desires to act against and in accordance with their evaluative judgment. However, Watson seems to assume what I call a ‘principle of closure of evaluation’, a principle that I argue can fail. The possibility of such failure of closure of evaluation means that Watson's argument can be resisted, allowing us to maintain this plausible account of akrasia.

Keywords:

• akrasia
• D. Davidson
• desires
• evaluation
• A. Mele
• practical rationality
• weakness of will
• self-control

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alan Hajek, Jordi Fernandez, Jason Grossman, Katrina Hutchison, and Daniel Star for helpful discussion and comments. I am especially grateful to Daniel Friedrich and Martin Smith for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.

Notes

Recently Richard Holton (1999) has argued that akrasia and what we ordinarily call ‘weakness of will’ are different phenomena. Mele (1987, p. 18) also distinguishes between the phenomena. Like Mele (1987) I am concerned with the former as Holton describes them, and as I specify it in the main text.

For simplicity I will focus on synchronic cases like Adam's in which the agent makes their practical judgment at the time of acting. However, we can distinguish a number of different forms, for instance in terms of whether the akrasia is synchronic or diachronic (when the agent makes their practical judgment sometime before the time of acting although does not revise that judgment between times), or in terms of the exact point of ‘the akratic break’, the point in their practical reasoning at which the agent departs from the ordinary case of acting in accordance with their practical judgment. See for example Rorty (1980) for an extensive discussion.

According to Nomy Arpaly (2000) it is sometimes rational for an agent to act against their judgment about what it is best to do. Arpaly offers examples in which an agent makes a mistaken judgment about what would be best for them to do: the agent is mistaken about what they really want, or what would suit their character and so makes a mistake about what would be best for them. It might be argued that even in these cases there is some sense in which the agent acts irrationally. However, even if this were not the case such cases are in the minority. It is uncontroversial that in most cases of akrasia the agent acts irrationally and it is these irrational cases that I will be concerned with here.

Of course, there are a number of ways of responding. Plato (1956/1971) and Hare (1963/1971), among others, deny the possibility of akrasia. They argue, for different reasons, that putative cases of akrasia are only apparent and in fact do not satisfy all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for akrasia, specified as (a)–(c) by Davidson. Davidson (1969/1980a) himself attempts to reconcile P1 and P2 with the possibility of akrasia: he appeals to the fact that (c) of the conditions for akrasia is concerned with the agent's all things considered judgment whereas P2 is concerned with their unconditional judgment, and he claims that these come apart in akrasia (see Watson, 1977 and Mele, 1987 for criticisms of Davidson). Interestingly no one, that I am aware of, responds by denying P1. Even Wiggins (1987), who notes that there are other ways of understanding strength of desire, say in terms of a desire's phenomenological intensity, proceeds to give an account that is consistent with P1.

Mele is explicit about rejecting Davidson's P2, see (Mele, 1987, p. 49).

Note that the common account does not entail that the akrates is motivated to act against their practical judgment under that description. They may have no thoughts about their practical judgment. Rather the account claims that they judge that it is best to do A and they are motivated to do B more than they are motivated to do A. It is in this sense that the common account claims that they are more motivated to act against their practical judgment than they are motivated to act in accordance with it.

Of course other kinds of state can also provide motivation including intentions, habits, urges, and so on.

Note that the common account is not committed to the view that having a desire entails being motivated to act to try to bring about what you desire (a view recently attacked by people like Strawson, 1994 and Schroeder, 2004). It merely claims that in akrasia the agent's desire to act against their practical judgment motivated them to act. The account is silent about the motivational implications of desires in other situations.

Watson, for example, notes that there is a phenomenological difference between ordinary cases of being compelled to act and cases of acting akratically (1977, p. 327).

The objection is repeated more recently in Tenenbaum (1999, p. 886).

Although the akrates is taken to be irrational it is commonly assumed that their irrationality is not due to their having contradictory beliefs. So we can assume that they do not both judge that it is better to do B than to do A and judge that it is better to do A than to do B.

Note that Mele's response to this problem raised by Watson is unsatisfactory. Mele claims that we can coherently imagine a case in which the agent judges A to be only slightly better than B and so decides not to exercise self-control but to indulge himself and do B instead (1987, p. 28). As Tenenbaum (1999) argues this response is silent about cases in which the agent judges A to be considerably better than B yet still does B. Such cases are possible and plausibly make up a large proportion of putative cases of akrasia (see Tenenbaum, 1999, pp. 887–890 for an example and discussion). It is not plausible in that kind of case to say that the agent is indulging himself.

On the basis of our experience of making choices and the results of psychological experiments Holton claims that ‘in very many cases we choose without ever having made a judgment about what would be best’ (2005, p. 7). He also claims, ‘choice is not determined by our prior beliefs and desires. It is quite compatible with a given set of beliefs and desires that we choose one way or that we choose another’ (2005, p. 4). If Holton is right and making a choice does not necessarily involve an evaluation of the alternatives then the objection can be blocked at the first step. If choosing not to exercise self-control does not involve judging that this is better than exercising self-control then the antecedent of the principle of closure of evaluation is false. So nothing will follow from this about the evaluation of the actions over which that the agent is deliberating about exercising self-control.

Thanks to Martin Smith for this formulation of the principle.

Thanks again to Martin Smith for bringing this distinction to my attention.

Mele, for example, denies that akrasia is due to such fragmentation or ‘partitioning’ (1987, p. 76ff), pace Davidson (1980b).

Of course, these must be independent counter examples: it would not do to present cases of akrasia as counter examples as this would beg the question against Watson. Rather we must first establish that closure fails in independent cases and take this as reason to deny that closure holds in akrasia. But by parity Watson cannot retreat to a more restricted principle concerned only with closure of evaluation for judgments about choices. There is no reason to think that such a principle is true independently of thinking that the common account is false, so to appeal to some such restricted principle would beg the question against the defender of the common account. Hence, Watson needs a suitably general principle like the one in the text.

This is what Kennett and Smith call ‘orthonomy’, which is ‘a matter of having the desires we rationally should have rather than those we rationally shouldn't’ (1996, p. 67, italics in original). They attribute some failure of self-control to failure of orthonomy where this involves an agent failing to most strongly desire to act in a way that they recognize they have a compelling normative reason to act. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.