Akrasia

Akrasia
Perspectives
- Classical
- Contemporary
  - Donald Davidson
  - Richard Holton (on weakness of will)
Literature

Akrasia (/əˈkreɪziə/; Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command" or "weakness", occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy) is a lack of mental strength or willpower, or the tendency to act against one's better judgment.

It is sometimes translated into English as incontinence ("a want of continence or self-restraint")

Perspectives

Classical

Plato

In Plato's Protagoras dialogue, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (Protagoras 358d).

It is not in human nature, apparently, to do so - to wish to go after what one thinks to be evil in preference to the good; and when compelled to choose one of two evils, nobody will choose the greater when he may the lesser.

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.

Aristotle

Aristotle, acknowledging that we intuitively believe in akrasia, devoted book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics to a more empirical approach to the question.

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. 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. Its causes could be weakness of will, or an impetuous refusal to think. 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.

Augustine of Hippo

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.

Contemporary

Donald Davidson

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.

"The 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.

Richard Holton (on weakness of will)

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.

Literature

In the structural division of Dante's Inferno, incontinence is the sin punished in the second through fifth circles. The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins, even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell.