Knowing Better

An Account of Akrasia

Eunice Belgum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367474355
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000055238
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1990, this book deals with the question of akrasia, weakness of will, or knowing better but doing worse. Versions of this principle are presupposed by Socrates and Plato, articulated as the 'practical syllogism' in Aristotle and play a central role in modern decision theory. The book considers the psychological explanation for this and different responses to the problem. The work is of interest not only as a piece of classical scholarship, action theory and moral psychology, but as a piece of meta-philosophy, and the philosophy about the methodology of philosophical disputes. It has enduring relevance as the problem of akrasia continues to be the object of much philosophical argument.

CHAPTER I

IS THERE A PROBLEM ABOUT AKRASIA?

Persons, patently, do not always behave reasonably. They act thoughtlessly, impulsively, carelessly. They act with lack of foresight, insight, attention, imagination. Through these and other failures, they harm their own interests unwittingly. Through these and other failures, they unwittingly harm the interests of other persons whom they do not want to harm. Persons also, it seems, harm themselves and others wittingly. They are, on occasion, ‘swept away’ by lust, jealousy, or rage. Though they know the harm that they intend to do, they ‘cannot restrain themselves’. In such a case, we are inclined to say, they ‘could not help it’.

Persons also, it seems, wittingly harm their own, or others, interests, even though they do not want to do so, and even though they could have avoided doing so. Such is the stuff of akrasia.

While unhappy facts, no doubt, from a practical point of view, cases of unwitting unreasonableness have not seemed conceptually problematic, in any serious way, even to philosophers. They are full of philosophical interest, certainly, but no one has ever questioned the possibility of their very occurrence; no one has ever suggested that there is something seriously wrong, even incoherent, about this way of describing them. Cases of so-called ‘psychological compulsion’ are unhappier yet, from a practical point of view. The consequences are often more dire; important aspects of the ‘personhood’ of the agent may even be called into question. But again, there is no controversy about the existence of cases such as these, or about the coherence of describing some behavior in this way.

Akratic acts, by contrast, have seemed to some--philosophers and others--to pose acute conceptual difficulties, in addition to the obvious practical ones. There seems to be a special difficulty in explaining such actions. The very facts which do explain, for example, an unwittingly cruel remark (thoughtlessness, lack of insight, etc.) here do not obtain; and, ex hypothesi, the akrates could have done otherwise. Some philosophers have argued that akrasia, as ordinarily understood, is quite impossible to explain; the admission of such a phenomenon would contradict general principles of action explanation. It is for this reason that they have been tempted to deny its very existence. Let us focus the problem more clearly.

A. The Intuitive Problem

There seem to be occasions on which a person performs an action which, all things considered, she/he knows, or judges, it would be better for her/him not to perform. Nonetheless she/he has a reason for the action, and performs it for that reason. This is the (ostensible) phenomenon of akrasia. There is a problem about akrasia because its existence is not easily reconcilable with beliefs we hold about intentional action which seem obviously true. It seems that when a person acts intentionally she/he acts ‘in the light of some imagined good’ (Aquinas). That is, there are aims or goals she/he wishes to realize; some of them can be realized through actions she/he is in a position to perform; and she/he acts, intentionally, in order to realize states of affairs which she/he considers desirable or good. There is a prima facie contradiction between such a view of intentional action and the foregoing description of akrasia, for akrasia is precisely intentional action which the agent judges to be contrary to her/his good.

Consider the following case: “I want a pin” says John. “For my collection” he explains. But searching for another pin now will make him miss the plane for Paris. “I grant that,” says John. “All things considered I certainly ought not to pause just now to collect another pin. Indeed, the hobby itself is beginning to bore me. Still, adding to my collection possesses some, if little, value.” And so he searches, collects one more pin, and misses the plane to Paris.

Surely we would find such a person odd. Surely we would insist that his account of his action simply won’t do. We might well suspect that he wants to miss that plane, but won’t tell us why. Or we might suspect that the pin collection is not what it appears. Do the pins contain microfilms? Has a crucial message been lost? Normally, that a person has a reason to perform an action, if she/he simultaneously has an overriding reason to refrain, is not a sufficient explanation of her/his performance of that action. We expect that, for a person’s acting on a reason to be explanatory it must be the reason the person considers best in the circumstances. Hence our positing of another reason altogether than the one that John has offered us.

Now the explanation offered by John is logically indistinguishable from the explanations characteristically offered by the akrates. I smoke for the pleasure, although I judge that pleasure to be not worth it; I languished in bed to avoid the pressures of the day, though I realized that the pressures would be greater yet after the wasted morning; I boarded the airplane because it would have been awkward to refuse, though of course social awkwardness is nothing compared to risking a crash. While each of these reasons surely provides a reason for the act performed, it just as surely provides no more than that. A part of the puzzle about akrasia is that we are inclined, at least at first, to accept any explanation of just this form. When offered the logically parallel explanation by John, we rejected it straightaway.

Let us call those who reject such explanations from the akrates, as well as from John, ‘skeptics’ with respect to the existence of open-eyed akrasia. The skeptic argues that akrasia, as described above, contradicts certain general truths about human action; consequently this description cannot be correct. The skeptic thus denies the possibility of this seemingly familiar phenomena. Let us call those concerned to salvage the possibility of the phenomena ‘believers’ with respect to open-eyed akrasia. The believers argue that the explanation offered by the akrates, suitably interpreted, can be distinguished from that offered by John. Suitably interpreted, open-eyed akrasia is compatible with reasonable general beliefs about action.

Socrates is surely the most famous of the skeptics. He claimed that it is quite impossible to explain any case of open-eyed akrasia. Indeed, he argued that we may shortly be reduced to incoherence if we even try. Thus, he denied its existence. In the Protagoras he indicates that many would disagree:

Most men … maintain that there are many who recognize the best but are unwilling to act on it. It may be open to them, but they do otherwise. Whenever I ask what is the reason for this, they answer that those who act in this way are overcome by pleasure or pain. (352d-e)

He then considers their claim in the light of the hedonist thesis--“Then your idea of evil is pain, and of good is pleasure” (354c). Next he performs a deft and elegant reductio on the common belief. If the good is pleasure, and pleasure the good, then those who fail to do what is best, knowingly, would be in the position of those who fail to do the pleasurable because, according to this account, they are “overcome by pleasure”. But by substitutivity of identity:

I fear that if our questioner is ill-mannered he will laugh and retort: ‘What ridiculous nonsense, for a man to do evil, knowing it is evil and that he ought not to do it, because he is overcome by good. (355c)

Thus:

… no one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course when he might choose the better. (358c)

The success of this reductio does not depend on the hedonist assumption; it works just as well if we substitute ‘honor’, ‘wealth’, or even ‘virtue’ for ‘pleasure’.¹ Indeed, it does not depend on any particular account of what makes the better better. The mere capacity for comparative judgments of relative value is all that is required. Donald Davidson generates a similar Socratic quandary about akrasia using no particular account of value at all.¹

¹Gerasimos Santas, “Plato’s Protagoras and the Explanation of Weakness,” The Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966).

Davidson suggests that the admission of open-eyed akrasia contradicts certain general beliefs about human action that “have the air of self-evidence”. The problem posed by this (apparent) contradiction is, he says, “acute enough to be called a paradox.” Davidson formalizes these general beliefs in two principles:²

P1.If an agent wants to do x more than he wants to do y and believes himself free to do either x or y, then he will intentionally do x if he does either x or y intentionally.

P2.If an agent judges that it would be better to do x than to do y, then he wants to do x more than he wants to do y.

P1 and P2 together entail that if an agent judges that it would be better for her/him to do x than to do y, and believes her/himself free to do either x or y, than she/he will do x if she/he does either x or y intentionally. An akratic act, however, would be an instance of not x. Thus, if these principles are true, it would seem to show that it is false that there are akratic acts.

It is not, however, simply false that there are akratic acts; no skeptic simply denies the occurrence of acts that others assert to have occurred. It is not the events per se, but rather the appropriate descriptions of these events that is at issue. There are two routes commonly taken by those who, in company with Socrates and Davidson, sense a contradiction here. One is the Socratic route, of assimilating ostensible cases of open-eyed akrasia to one or another form of unwitting unreasonableness. The other, more common, is to assimilate akrasia to one or another form of psychological compulsion.

¹Donald Davidson, “How is Weakness of Will Possible?”, in Moral Concepts, ed. Joel Feinberg (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.93–113.

²Ibid., pp.94–5.

Thus, Socrates:

That which the many describe as enslavement to oneself is nothing but ignorance and mastery of oneself is nothing but wisdom … and we define ignorance as having a false belief and being mistaken. (Protagoras, 358c)

Aristotle refines the relevant sense of ‘ignorance’; Davidson proliferates the relevant sorts of ‘judgment’ involved.

Plato, in the Timaeus, favors the compulsion line:

… in general, all that which is termed incontinence of pleasure and is deemed, a reproach under the idea that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly a matter of reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad, but the bad become bad by reason of an ill-disposition of the body and.bad education--things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will. (86d-e)

Hare, following Plato, makes psychological inability the paradigm case of akrasia.¹ This is surely the most plausible account of the (all too) familiar plights of Medea and St. Paul. Indeed, in these cases, the compulsion seems even to stem from sources other than the agent’s own psyche. “Some God is on its [desire’s] side” cries Medea; Paul, less graphically, pleads, “If what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin that lodges in me.” (Romans 7) Less worn, and more poignant, is Thomas Mann’s brilliant figure, Praisegod Piepsum. Here, surely, is a ‘weakness’ which is stronger than its possessor, if ever there was one.

¹R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p.71

In the first place, he drank …. Once he had been able to resist, to some extent, though yielding to it by bouts. But when his wife and child were snatched from him, when he had no work and no position, nothing to support him, when he stood alone on this earth, then his weakness took more and more the upper hand. … He drank because he had no self-respect, and he had no self-respect because the continual breakdown of his good intentions ate it away. At home in his wardrobe he kept a bottle with a poisonous-colored liquor in it, the name of which I will refrain from mentioning. Before this wardrobe Praisegod Piepsam had before now gone literally on his knees, and in his wrestlings had bitten his tongue--and still in the end capitulated. I do not like even to mention such things--but after al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Addendum to Selected Bibliography (November 1989)
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter I. Is There a Problem About Akrasia?
• Chapter II. Mistaking the Wanton for the Akrates
• Chapter III. The Davidsonian Akrates
• Chapter IV. Teleological Explanation
• Chapter V. The Aristotelian Akrates
• Selected Bibliography