The Weakness of the Will

Justin Gosling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134966806
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 2004. Since before Plato, philosophers have puzzled over why it is that people will sometimes deliberately take the worst course of action. The book begins by examining the various theories put forward by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and a selection of medieval philosophers and discusses how and why later philosophers avoid the problem. In the second section, Justin Gosling argues that familiar ways of viewing the problem mislocate the apparent irrationality of weakness. The author then moves on to the traditional cases of being overcome by passion to argue for a further sense in which weakness may be thought irrational, and to open up an unusually wide field of examples for consideration.

PART 1

CHAPTER I
The Protagoras

In Western philosophy the so-called problem of weakness of will takes its start in the notorious Socratic paradox that people cannot knowingly choose the worse of two available alternatives. The best source for an early version of this thesis is Plato’s Protagoras 351 valuing something and what we all pursu8. There Socrates argues that the common view that our knowledge of what is best can be overcome by pleasure, fear, anger and the like, is wholly wrong. Agents always choose what they think best Those who know what is best eo ipso have correct beliefs about what is best, and since they cannot choose contrary to these beliefs, they cannot choose contrary to their knowledge. Apparent cases of people not being in control of their emotions, and acting against their better judgment, are really cases of people who, lacking the ability to distinguish illusion from reality, are victims of vacillating judgment resulting from the illusions of the moment. They always do what they think best, but their views on what is best have no sure grounding, and change with changing appearances.

As it stands, this hardly carries conviction, and has commonly been felt to fly in the face of the facts (see, e.g., Lemmon 1962). In what follows I shall first concentrate on expounding Socrates’ views in this passage in so far as they bear on the possibility of deliberate wrongdoing, with some indication of his arguments. It will still seem pretty implausible. I shall then, in the next chapter, try to make it sound a more attractive position, partly by illustrating how Socrates could deal with apparent counter-examples, and partly by showing how he could challenge his opponents to produce a coherent alternative. At this point it should be easier to assess the extent to which Socrates’ position is open to effective criticism, and the exteftt to which he has raised a genuine problem.

The Structure of the Passage

There is considerable dispute as to how seriously we are intended to take the argument for hedonism, and how we are to understand the thesis about the unity of the virtues, but I shall be interested in the passage solely for the light it throws on the thesis that one cannot knowingly do wrong. I shall engage in dispute with scholars only in so far as it seems helpful for clarifying the exposition.

Prior to this passage, Socrates has been arguing that all the virtues are in some important sense one. Protagoras has objected that courage at least is different from the rest Socrates goes off at an apparent tangent by raising three ordered questions. First, he queries the view that pleasure can be bad. Second, in order to settle this question he puts a further one: whether, as most people seem to think, knowledge can be dragged around by passion, and in particular pleasure. He recognizes that the denial that it can raises the third question: just what is the experience commonly described as being overcome by pleasure, if it is not what most people suppose? The answers to these three questions supply the answer to the background question as to whether courage is a virtue distinct from the rest.

The question of whether knowledge can be dragged around by passion directs the discussion to the further question of what it is that people value and pursue. Since the weak supposedly choose what they consider to be worse, it is pertinent to ask what thinking something worse/better amounts to, and what the object(s) of choice might be. Examples are proposed in order to convince us that all our valuing is based on judgments about overall pleasure. We can certainly make sense of saying that some pleasures are bad, but only in that if we take them together with their consequences they result in more distress than pleasure. The only factor which counts with us in favour of saying something is good is pleasure, and the only one which counts against is distress. This discussion employs a distinction between being pleasant considered in itself and being pleasant overall, and by 355a has yielded a use of ‘pleasure’, in equating pleasure with the good, whereby it refers to a life of pleasure free of distress.

It also requires that we be able to understand a distinction between ‘good so far as it goes’ and ‘good overall’ and between both and ‘the good’.

In all this no distinction is made between the questions whether pleasure is the good and whether we all pursue/value pleasure.

Indeed,the view that pleasure is the good is argued not on the grounds that we ought to pursue it, but on the grounds that there is nothing else that we do value or pursue. Nor is any distinction made between what we all use as grounds for valuing something and what we all pursue. Thus at 354b5c5 we find:

Are these things good for any other reason than that they result in pleasures and release from and prevention of distress? or can you mention any other outcome to which you refer in calling them good apart from pleasure and distress? They would say ‘No’, I think. – I agree, said Protagoras.—So [my emphasis] you pursue pleasure as good and avoid distress as evil?

What we have, in fact, is a form of psychological hedonism whereby (i) we give something value just and only in so far as we think it gives pleasure/avoids distress; (ii) we consider one thing better than another (pursue it in preference to another) if and only if we consider that its pleasure value exceeds that of the other; and (iii) in all this we show that our final objective is a life of pleasure free of distress, because that would be best of all, and anything else is pursued as the nearest approximation.

Granted this, it follows directly that if someone fails to pursue the course which yields the maximum pleasure, then either they are unable to do it, or they do not know how to achieve that goal. Since we are assuming ability in the weak, they must be displaying ignorance. In fact Socrates does not move directly to this conclusion. Instead he argues first that he is now in a position to show the common opinion that we can be overcome by pleasure to be absurd. He claims that he is entitled to substitute ‘pleasure’ for ‘good’, or conversely, in the common description of deliberate wrong-doing, and that the outcome is absurd.

The details of this interlude are fascinating, but I shall not go into them. I shall just make two comments. First, the argument is nothing like so bad as it looks if we recognize that there is for Socrates an asymmetry between ‘A believes that x is good’ and ‘A believes that x is pleasant.’ The first is equivalent to ‘A takes x as something worth pursuing’, while the second attributes to A the belief that x has a certain property. The whole argument to this point has been that all our deliberating and valuing takes a certain form, that of judgments about pleasure outcomes. Second, it is an interlude whose function in the argument is twofold. First, it is easier to persuade someone to take seriously an apparently implausible thesis if you can show them that on their own admissionstheir own thesis is absurd. This gives them a motive for taking an alternative seriously. Second, in discussing the results of substituting ‘pleasure’ for ‘good’ Socrates notes the objection that there is surely all the difference in the world between immediate and distant pleasure. This gives him a natural passage to a discussion aiming to show that weak people do not pursue what they think to be less pleasant/good, but are misled into thinking that the nearer pleasure is also overall pleasanter/better. It remains that the conclusion that ignorance explains bad choices follows directly from the earlier argument, and nothing in the substitution argument is needed for that conclusion.

Appearance and Knowledge

In developing the second substitution, Socrates recognizes that one difficulty people will have with it is that it requires us to say that the nearness or distance of a pleasure makes no difference to the question of pleasantness; yet the weak commonly fall for the near in preference to the distant pleasure. Clearly, Socrates can only cope with this by claiming that they must be duped into thinking that the nearer pleasure is in fact greater than the more distant ones. This is in fact what he proceeds to do, by drawing a comparison between the effect of physical distance on the apparent sizes of objects to sight, and the effect of temporal distance on the apparent degrees of pleasure attaching to courses of action. Most of us are familiar with the visual situation, and so do not convert how things look into judgments about their relative size. Socrates seems to claim that if we were not familiar with some measuring technique enabling us to compare the sizes of objects, then that conversion would be automatic, and our beliefs about relative size would change as we changed our relative positions. With pleasure we most of us lack the sort of measuring corrective which we have in the visual case, and so the appearance of greater pleasure conferred on an activity by its proximity is converted into a judgment of its greater pleasantness. Since, presumably, how pleasant something appears will be a function not only of how near it is, but also of how much we are currently enjoying ourselves or otherwise, our judgments can be expected to be in a constant flux and, by analogy with the visual case, most of them probably false. Only knowledge of the measurement of pleasure can save us from this situation, but, if we can transfer to pleasure the remarks on the phantasy case of everything in life depending on judgments of size (356de), such knowledge will in fact render appearances powerless and bring peace and stability to life. (For criticisms of the visual analogy, see Taylor’s commentary ad loc.)

This gives us the thesis that a certain form of knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for achieving our goal in life. Since everyone who lacks knowledge is a victim of appearances, and no-one who has knowledge goes wrong, this thesis does not distinguish between the weak and the vicious wrong-doer, at least in that first, they must both be ignorant, and secondly, as such, but nevertheless making judgments, must be judging by appearances only. Now the suggestion of the condition of someone lacking knowledge is that their judgments of relative value will change from moment to moment. This yields quite a good rival picture of the akratic as someone who at the time misjudges the value of the course chosen, and is only going against their better judgment in the sense of now judging something different from what they usually judge. It is not at all clear how to generate the unwavering villain.

In all this it is perhaps worth noting certain distinctions which Socrates accepts or rejects.

• Socrates accepts, and holds that we all understand, the distinction between something’s being pleasant considered in isolation, and being pleasant overall, taking into account the action itself and its consequences. Our ability to weigh up pleasures in deliberation relies on our understanding this distinction.
• Socrates denies that we are any of us capable of desiring anything but what we think best/pleasantest overall. So although we all know the contrast between short-term and long-term pleasure, there is no such thing as our wanting what we recognize to be pleasant in the short term but less pleasant than some alternative in the long term.
• Socrates allows that we are sometimes attracted to/want what is in fact a short-term pleasure in preference to what is in fact a long-term greater pleasure, but explains the fact, consistently with (i) and (ii), in terms of our being victims of appearances, so that we erroneously judge the short-term pleasure to be overall pleasanter than the long-term.
• There is a contrast which Socrates neither accepts nor rejects, but whose absence from the discussion makes many modern readers have difficulty in accepting his conclusion. This is the distinction between a probable and an improbable pleasure. Many people today take it for granted that the probability or otherwise of a pleasure must make a difference to how worth it is pursuing. While there are obviously risks involved in delaying one’s pleasures, the distinction between the probable and the improbable is not the same as that between the near and the distant, and it is a distinction which finds no place in Socrates’ exposition.

Socrates’ Thesis

It should now be clear that the substitution argument is a counter-attack which does not itself make any contribution towards establishing the nature of akrasia or showing why knowledge cannot be dragged about, or whether any pleasure can be bad. If one omits it, the main argument proceeds quite smoothly. Its success does, however, depend on the main thesis, which is sufficient by itself to achieve Socrates’ other purposes. This main thesis is extremely strong, and it is worth stressing certain important features of it.

The first is the streamlined view of evaluation and motivation. At 354bc Socrates moves directly from the admission that the sole grounds for calling operations, wars and such like good are the pleasures they yield, to the admission that it is pleasure that we pursue as good. It might be thought that it would be open to someone to distinguish between what we recognize, when reflecting, as what makes projects worthwhile, and what in practice we pursue and are attracted to in the hurly-burly of life. Socrates rushes us past that possibility. Further, there is only one object of our pursuit, so that there is no room for effective conflict of desire. Three things that might suggest conflict can happen: I might, for instance, when faced with a snooty shop-assistant, say that I wanted to give him a piece of my mind but thought better of it, when the situation is that I could think of nothing suitably cutting to say, only some pompous idiocy. So in fact I wished I were clever enough to think what to do, but there was no specific option which I wanted but resisted. Second, I can recognize the lesser pleasantness of another course, and so, in a sense, ineffectively desire it. Third, I can vacillate: I eye the éclair, remember pictures of paunchy heart-sufferers, eye the éclair again, and so on. In this case I want the éclair, then decide I do not, then think perhaps I do. All this Socrates can allow for. What he cannot allow is the simultaneous pull in different directions of desires for distinct objects not desired under a heading which yields an agreed relative assessment. Given my one objective, I shall always go for what I think will yield it, if my belief remains stable long enough to produce action. The result is that any reflection we do on the grounds of valuing things will, if it reaches the point of drawing attention to something which can be done here and now to achieve those values, lead to appropriate action.

As I have emphasized, the result of this is that if, in being overcome by pleasure, etc., I choose to indulge, then I must believe that the indulgence is pleasure-maximizing, or the best thing to do. Since the account is supposed to apply to being overcome by passions generally, this leads to the second point: Socrates is committed to the view that greed, fear, anger, love and the rest are forms of judgment of what is best/pleasure-maximizing or bad/non-pleasure-maximizing. This is not altogether implausible. Socrates is not alone in wanting to incorporate some element of belief into the passions. In his case the thesis would have to be that a person who is greedy thinks this food a good thing to get; who is afraid, thinks that this situation is best avoided; who is angry, thinks that this treatment is of a sort it would be best not to sit down under; who is in love, that this person is one it would be good to consort with. A person who chooses to act on passion thus acts in accordance with the judgment which at least partly constitutes that passion. (There will be more to be said about Socrates’ view of the passions later.)

Third, it should be noted that the absurdity in holding that knowledge can be overcome by pleasure and the rest is brought out without anything particular having been said about knowledge. Obviously, it is assumed that if I know an indulgence to be bad and nevertheless choose to indulge, I at least believe it to be bad and nevertheless indulge. So if it is impossible for me to choose what I believe to be bad in preference to what I believe better, it is impossible to choose what I know to be bad in preference to what I know to be better. This contrasts with the later, Republic, view.

Finally, Socrates accepts very tight connections between (i) knowledge and true belief, (ii) acceptance of new information and change of belief and (iii) knowledge and the calming of passions. When at 356c seq. he turns to the explanation of how people are attracted to short-term pleasure, he draws his analogy between, the effect of the temporal distance of pleasures on attraction-appearances and the effect of physical distance on visual and auditory appearances. At 356d we read:

So if our prospering depended on this, depended on doing and choosing large distances, avoiding and not doing small ones, what would emerge as the salvation of our lives? would it be the skill of measurement or the power of appearance? Did not the latter turn out to deceive us and make us often change this way and that about the same things and repent both our actions and our choices of large and small things, while the skill of measurement would deprive this appearance of its power, and by making clear the truth would bring the soul to steady rest in the truth and would save our lives? In face of this, would they agree that anything but the skill of measurement would be our salvation?

Note, to begin with, that we are only given two choices: the skill of measurement, which turns out to be knowledge, and the power of appearances. Since the power of appearances is characteristically in error and deceives us, it is useless for our purposes. So if anything is going to help, it has to be knowledge (or the skill of measurement). This, however, is apparently sufficient to remove the power of appearances and produce the truth. No room is allowed for relatively stable true (or false) opinion, though there might be room for a stage of progressive acquisition of skills of measurement Further, it seems that acquisition of the skill, and its application, bring belief automatically in their train. It is plausible to hold that if I know the relative pleasure measurements of two courses of action, then I have a true belief as to what they are; but Socrates seems to be drawing rather more from that apparent truism. He seems to suppose (i) that if I have the skill, I shall always exercise it; (ii) that if I begin to exercise it I shall always have the time or information to reach a true conclusion; and (iii) that applications of my skill will always carry my judgment with them. This last brings home the strongly ‘intellectual’ account of the passions to which he seems committed. For the analogy with the untutored viewer who is deceived about sizes is supposed to give us the condition of the putative w...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY THEIR PAST AND PRESENT
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EXPLANATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1
• PART 2
• BIBLIOGRAPHY