What is the link between regret and weakness of will?

Abstract

This paper argues (a) that most contemporary accounts of weakness of will either implicitly or explicitly assume that regret is a typical or even necessary element of standard cases of weakness of will and (b) that this assumption is mistaken. I draw on empirical and philosophical work on self-assessment to show that regret need not accompany typical weak-willed behavior, and that we should therefore revise the dominant account of the difference between weakness of will and (mere) changes of mind.

Keywords:

• Akrasia
• Regret
• Self-Assessment
• Self-Control
• Self-Knowledge
• Weakness of Will

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rosalind Abdool and Eric Hochstein for valuable research assistance on this project. For helpful discussion and feedback, thanks to Shannon Dea, Susan Dimock, Kerah Gordon-Solomon, Tim Kenyon, Tamar Shapiro, Abigail Scholer, Jesse Summers, and to audiences at the University of Waterloo, the University of New Brunswick Fredericton, Queen’s University, Wilfrid Laurier University, The Northwestern Society for Ethical Theory, and the 2013 Canadian Philosophical Association meetings at the University of Victoria. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

¹ While Aristotle’s focus is on character traits, not specific actions, those with akratic characters will (a) frequently perform akratic actions and (b) typically regret those actions.

² Holton has since modified his view and now defends a view closer to Mele’s disjunctive account, according to which both resolution violation and judgment violation are part of the concept of weakness of will (May & Holton, 2012).

³ Mele (1996) calls such cases “Socratic akrasia” and argues that they are derivatively akratic. The judgment-shift model differs partly in treating them as paradigmatic cases rather than derivative ones.

⁴ For another version of the claim that something like akrasia can be rational, see Arpaly (2000).

⁵ Bratman’s regret condition is officially offered as an account of the rationality of intention-revision, rather than of weakness of will, though the connection with weakness of will is clear.

⁶ Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for raising the possibility of this objection.

⁷ Not all biases are in favor of consistency: we also have a tendency to see ourselves as improving over time even when no improvement occurs (Wilson & Ross, 2001). While this bias mistakenly sees the self as inconsistent when it has been consistent. The underlying motivation is the same: to promote a positive current self-image.

⁸ The phenomenon of “inverse akrasia”—actions that are contrary to an agent’s judgment that are nonetheless rational—might represent a kind of false positive. The possibility of rational action against one’s better judgment is defended by Arpaly (2000). Arpaly, however, agrees that such actions really are akratic. The possibility of false positives suggests another possible explanation for such cases: the regretful agent mistakenly believes that she acts contrary to her judgment.

⁹ Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pressing this objection.

¹⁰ Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for suggesting this point.

¹¹ Frequent weakness might also lead to accurate self-assessment in a different way: repeated failures to stick to a resolution might lead one to conclude that one is incapable of following through, and so to abandon the resolution altogether. There may be a limit to how frequently a person can be weak-willed before we question whether that person is, in fact, violating a commitment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathieu Doucet

Mathieu Doucet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.