Akrasia[a] refers to the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment—the state in which one intentionally performs an action while simultaneously believing that a different course of action would be better.[1][2] Sometimes translated as "weakness of will" or "incontinence," akrasia describes the paradoxical human experience of knowingly choosing what one judges to be the inferior option.
In Plato'sProtagoras dialogue,Socrates asks precisely how it is possible that,if one judges action A to be the best course of action, why one would do anything other than A.[3]
In Plato'sProtagoras, Socrates presents a radical thesis that fundamentally denies the existence of akrasia. His famous declaration, "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν κακός), encapsulates a view known asSocratic intellectualism.[4]
According to Socrates, genuine akrasia is impossible because human action necessarily follows knowledge. His argument proceeds through several interconnected premises:
Given the above premises, Socrates concludes that it is psychologically impossible for someone who truly knows what is best to act otherwise. The person who possesses genuine knowledge of the good will inevitably pursue it, as this pursuit aligns with both human nature and rational necessity.
Therefore, in the Socratic framework, what appears to be akrasia—acting against one's better judgment—is actually a form of ignorance. Actions that seem to contradict what is objectively best must result from incomplete knowledge of the facts, inadequate understanding of what constitutes the genuine good, or failure to properly calculate the consequences of one's actions.
Aristotle recognizes that the possibility of acting contrary to one's best judgment is a staple of commonsense and a common human experience.[8] Aristotle dedicates Book VII of theNicomachean Ethics to an examination of akrasia, adopting a distinctly empirical approach that contrasts sharply with Socratic intellectualism.[9] He distanced himself from the Socratic position by distinguishing different mental faculties and their roles in action. He argues that akrasia results from the one's opinion (δόξα,doxa), not one's desire (epithumia) per se. The crucial difference here is that while desire is a natural condition of the body incapable of truth or falsity, opinion is a belief that may or may not be true, acognitive state. Therefore, akratic failures can be explained by the incorrectness of one's best judgment rather than a failure to attempt to act according to one's best judgment. When an agent's best judgment is a false belief, it does not have the power to compel one that Socrates attributed to knowledge of what is genuinely best.
For Aristotle, the opposite ofakrasia isenkrateia, a state where an agent has power over their desires.[10] 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.[11] Its causes could be weakness of will, or an impetuous refusal to think.[12] At the same time he did not consider it a vice because it is not so much a product of moral choice as a failure to act on one's better knowledge.[13]
ForAugustine of Hippo, incontinence was not so much a problem of knowledge but of thewill; he considered it a matter of everyday experience that men incontinently choose lesser over greater goods.[14]
Donald Davidson attempted to answer the question by first criticizing earlier thinkers who wanted to limit the scope of akrasia to agents who despite having reached arational 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. "[T]he 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 apparentlyinconsistent triad:
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.
Another contemporary philosopher,Amélie Rorty, has tackled the problem by distilling out akrasia's many forms. She contends that akrasia is manifested in different stages of thepractical reasoning process. She enumerates four types of akrasia: akrasia of direction or aim, of interpretation, of irrationality, and of character. She separates the practical reasoning process into four steps, showing the breakdown that may occur between each step and how each constitutes an akratic state.
Another explanation is that there are different forms ofmotivation that can conflict with each other. Throughout the ages, many have identified a conflict betweenreason andemotion, which might make it possible to believe that one should do A rather than B, but still end up wanting to do B more than A.
PsychologistGeorge Ainslie argues that akrasia results from the empirically verified phenomenon ofhyperbolic discounting, which causes us to make different judgments close to a reward than we will when further from it.[15]
Richard Holton argues that weakness of the will involves revising one'sresolutions too easily. Under this view, it is possible to act against one's better judgment (that is, be akratic) without being weak-willed. Suppose, for example, Sarahjudges 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.
In the structural division ofDante'sInferno, incontinence is the sin punished in the second through fifth circles.[16] The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins,[17] even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell.
Akrasia appeared later as a character in Spenser'sThe Faerie Queene, representing the incontinence of lust, followed in the next canto by a study of that of anger;[18] and as late asJane Austen thesensibility of such figures asMarianne Dashwood would be treated as a form of (spiritual) incontinence.[19]
But with the triumph ofRomanticism, the incontinent choice of feeling over reason became increasingly valorised in Western culture.[20]Blake wrote, "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained".[21] Encouraged byRousseau, there was a rise of whatArnold J. Toynbee called "anabandon (ακρατεια)...a state of mind in whichantinomianism is accepted—consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice—as a substitute for creativeness".[22]
A peak of such akrasia was perhaps reached in the 1960s cult of letting it all hang out—of breakdown, acting out, and emotional self-indulgence and drama.[23] Partly in reaction, the proponents ofemotional intelligence looked back to Aristotle in the search for impulse control anddelayed gratification[24]—to his dictum that "a person is called continent or incontinent according as his reason is or is not in control".[25]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
