Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Volume 59, Issue 4, December 1999

The Judgment of a Weak Will

In trying to explain the possibility of akrasia (weakness of will), it seems plausible to deny that there is a conceptual connection between motivation (what one wants) and evaluation (what one judges to be good); akrasia occurs when the agent is (most) motivated to do something that she does not judge to be good (all things considered). However, it is hard to see how such accounts could respect our intuition that the akratic agent acts freely, or that there is a difference between akrasia and compulsion. It is also hard to see how such accounts could be extended to the realm of theoretical reason, but this is generally not taken Ito be a problem, because it is generally assumed that there is no similar phenomenon in the realm of theoretical reason. This paper argues that there is such a thing as theoretical akrasia, and that we can find a characterization of this phenomenon in Descartes’s Meditations. Drawing on certain passages in the Meditations, we can construct an account of theoretical akrasia; this account can then be adapted to resolve the original problem of akrasia in the realm of practical reason. The account asserts that there is a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation in free action; it also enables us to show how the akratic agent is still acting freely when he does something that he does not judge to be the best all things considered.