Abstract
I begin by refuting Davidson’s classic account of akrasia, which turns on a purported distinction between judging p and judging p “all things considered.” The upshot of this refutation is that an adequate account of akrasia must turn on a distinction between different ways in which the agent can make judgments about her practical reasons. On the account I propose, an akratic agent makes an existential judgment that there is some decisive practical reason to act in a certain way without also knowing what that reason is. An agent can do what such a reason requires only by deviating from the conditions under which her action would be a response to it. The possibility of akrasia is a consequence of our concern not only to perform actions that match what our reasons require but also to manifest reasons in conduct that they inform.
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Notes
I use the (relatively) etymologically opaque akrasia instead of “weakness of the will” to label action contrary to our better judgment in part so as not to prejudge a suggestion that in this phenomenon the will is in fact too strong, and overpowers our better judgment. Holton (1999) compellingly argues that the label “weakness of the will” is better reserved for the distinct phenomenon in which we act contrary to one of our intentions.
Some philosophers simply deny that the possibility of akrasia is problematic, and thus fall into neither of these categories. Here we may cite Mele, who takes it as “obvious” that in certain circumstances “the motivational force of a want may be out of line with the agent's evaluation of the object of that want” (Mele 1987: 37). The issue between these philosophers and those I group with Davidson does not concern whether akrasia is possible, but whether the fact that akrasia is possible at all needs to be explained. So it is irrelevant to this dispute to cite, as if this settled it, the fact that “motivation and evaluation do not stand in a simple and direct relation to each other, as so often supposed,” or that in particular cases the “large arrays of complex psychic structures, such as mood, energy, and interest” that “mediate” their “interrelations” are disrupted (Stocker 1979: 738–9). I will presuppose that the following is a good question: how is it possible in general that particular cases of akrasia can arise and require such local explanations?
Sarah Stroud’s article on “weakness of will” in the Stanford Encyclopedia describes the influence of Davidson’s treatment on the subsequent literature as “towering” (Stroud 2008).
Much of the literature about akrasia since Davidson concerns whether an “internalist” thesis more or less along the lines of P2 is really true. (“Internalism” here means affirming an “internal,” i.e., a necessary, connection between the agent’s best judgment and her motivation.) Some of those who defend or work within an internalist conception of the link between motivation and the agent’s best judgment are Bratman (1979), Buss (1997), Tenenbaum (1999), and Stroud (2003). What’s reasonably clear from this literature is that, to the extent that you are willing to weaken or dissolve this “internal” connection between the agent’s best judgment and her motivation, the “externalist” position you thereby move towards also disentitles you to any philosophical puzzlement about the possibility of akrasia. You also risk making what makes the agent do whatever she does look like an alien force that simply takes hold of her, thus failing to satisfy clauses (a) or (b) of Davidson’s definition D and losing the phenomenon of akrasia. Buss (1997) and Tenenbaum (1999) press this point against Mele (1987).
The notions of relevance and availability of reasons are not nearly as straightforward as this casual use of them would seem to imply. In the right circumstances, any fact, no matter how insignificant, could be relevant to the agent’s deliberations, and in at least that sense it is relevant to them. And availability is a modal notion—presumably here it means something like “available without the agent’s going to too much trouble.” But whence do we acquire criteria for deciding how much trouble is too much?
I draw on Brandom’s formalism for treating the de re/de dicto distinction as a distinction between different ways of attributing commitments rather than between two different ways of believing (Chapter 8 of Brandom 1994, especially pp. 542–547).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer and to Robert Dunn for prompting my reflection on the Freudian aspect of Davidson’s thought.
As Bratman remarks: “[T]he range of phenomena which might be said to be instances of weakness of the will… include[s] cases of non-action which are not deliberate omissions, for example: staying in bed while knowing one ought to get up” (Bratman 1979: 153).
It may be that Davidson would allow doing nothing as a possible value for x. Then my claim is just that his formulation misleadingly seems to prejudge the controversy, even if he himself does not. I am grateful to Markus Schlosser for this point.
I will not always write out this disjunction, so henceforth please understand my use of the singular “reason” as shorthand for “reason or cluster of reasons.”
I speak of knowledge here for grammatical simplicity’s sake. It is an interesting question whether knowing what something is has a privative “mere-belief form,” and if so what that mere-belief form is. Pending closure on that question, I do not insist that avoiding akrasia requires more from the agent than a privative mere-belief form of knowing what her reason to do A is. So please understand my talk of “knowing what X is” as shorthand for “knowing what X is or having mere belief what X is.”
I need not consider cases in which the agent’s existential judgment is not responsive to any reason at all; those cases cannot motivate this worry. I am very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to respond to this objection.
I say “has to” because the occasional happy coincidence would not disturb my account.
I expect that many will regard this distinction as merely verbal. This worry calls for a serious and thorough discussion for which I do not have space here.
References
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Acknowledgments
I wrote this paper while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. I am grateful for the support of the Centre for Time. In addition to those I have already mentioned, I want to thank Alejandro Pérez Carballo, Rachael Driver, Hongwoo Kwon, Joshua Mendelsohn, John Maier, Evgenia Mylonaki, Huw Price, Katia Vavova, Stephen White, and audiences at the University of Sydney and the ISTC-CNR, for their attention to various versions of this paper.
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Strom, G. Deviant Causal Chains, Knowledge of Reasons, and Akrasia . Topoi 33, 67–76 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9209-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9209-4