Problem Set 08
Instructions
This problem set is due in class Thursday, 10/25. Again, I do not mind students working on the problem sets in groups--it is, in fact, encouraged--but your answers must be your own. If you have any question, puzzle, or require clarification, please do not hesitate to contact me (berkich@gmail.com; 3976 office, 944-2756 mobile--texts strongly preferred).
The Problem of Akrasia
In class Thursday we took up the Problem of Freedom of Will, motivated in part by the extent to which many of our social practices and institutions hold us responsible for our actions. For example, we express gratitude for someone's praiseworthy action on our behalf--"thank you for holding the door!", say--or anger at someone's blameworthy action affecting us--"thanks for slamming the door in my face, you jerk!". We have Courts of Law and penal systems dedicated to holding citizens accountable for their bad actions. We even have grading schemes which presuppose that some students deserve poor grades for want of effort while others merit good grades in recognition of their diligence.
As we become adults, we find ourselves in a complicated social world of differing and intersecting responsibilities. As we discussed in class, those responsibilities can variously be moral, legal, or even etiquettical, which are at least sometimes at odds with one another. What all of them share in common is the presumption that we, as adults, can be held responsible for our actions. They are, that is to say, our actions: We freely, knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately choose to perform them, we could have chosen otherwise; and we could have done otherwise--we were not in any way constrained, compelled, or even confined.
Sometimes, though, it goes all screwy. Consider the following story:
I like chocolate ice-cream. In fact, I like chocolate ice-cream very, very much. But I know that it is not good for me to eat chocolate ice-cream, particularly when I scoop it onto fudge brownies and dowse the whole affair with chocolate syrup.
One evening I return home from campus and consider fixing just such a chocolate ice-cream sundae. I weigh all the reasons for it (they are delicious and I am hungry) and all the reasons against it (it's really, really fattening, and I am already too fat). I decide that, all things considered, it would be better for me to abstain from having the chocolate ice-cream sundae.
I then calmly, deliberately, and intentionally go to the kitchen, fix, and eat a large chocolate ice-cream sundae.
This is the problem of Akrasia, sometimes also called the problem of Weakness of the Will. Where to be responsible is (at least in part) to enjoy self-control, akrasia is a curious failure of self-control--curious, that is, because although it might be tempting to say that I was overcome by desire, I wasn't. I intentionally made and ate the sundae; there was nothing frantic or wanton in my action. Yet I acted so after consciously deliberating about what would be best to do and deciding that it would be best to not have the sundae. If asked, “But didn't you just conclude that you shouldn't have the sundae?”, I would respond, between mouthfuls of sundae, “Yes, that is quite correct. But here we are anyway. I'm as surprised about it as you.”
Thus it seems that my actions contradict my reasons for them. Yet I am not raving or mad.
Intentionally performing an action the agent judges worse than an available and incompatible alternative suggests self-deception and perhaps irrationality. If actions are evidence of dispositions and dispositions reliably indicate beliefs, then the agent apparently holds the contradictory belief that P and not P: “I shall refrain from acting yet I shall so act.” This is the problem of weakness of will or akrasia:
What in Anglo-Saxon philosophical circles is called the problem of weakness of will concerns what worried Socrates: the problem of how an agent can choose to take what they believe to be the worse course, overcome by passion. The English expression would not, or at least not primarily, bring this sort of case to mind, but rather such examples as dilatoriness, procrastination, lack of moral courage and failure to push plans through. The Greek word 'akrasia', on the other hand, means 'lack of control', and that certainly suggests the Socratic sort of example. [Gosling (1990), p. 97]
The phrase 'lack of control' should be taken literally. Akrasia is problematic because the weak of will or incontinent somehow fail to act as they themselves think they should--it is as if they are not the authors of their own actions, which makes the intentionality with which they act all the more puzzling.
The tension between best judgment and intentional action the akrates presents, a tension wholly lacking in those who enjoy abundant kratos or power of self-control (enkrateia) [cf Mele (1987), p.4], is so great Socrates concluded it was simply absurd. Apparent cases are impossible, since “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.” [Protagoras 358c]. Yet Aristotle famously dismisses Socrates' conclusion, since it “contradicts the plain phenomena.” [Nicomachean Ethics 1145b27]
I side with Aristotle: Conceptual difficulties notwithstanding, akrasia is a puzzling yet common feature of human agency. Maybe my chocolate ice cream example fails to strike the right note for whatever reason. We are all of us nevertheless intimately familiar with procrastinating. (I say this with great confidence, given the number of students who wait until thirty minutes before a problem set is due to get help on it, to say nothing of the number of students begging to be allowed to use a notecard on the final examination because they can't be bothered to memorize nine (9!) simple rules of inference. But I digress...)
Solving the puzzle requires explaining how the akrates' intentional action can deviate so remarkably from her best judgment. How, that is, does it happen that the akrates lacks self-control for actions she herself presumably controls? Is the akrates fundamentally irrational? Self-deceived? Temporarily insane?
Let us set the problem a bit more precisely. Following Davidson, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?”, we shall define akrasia as follows:
D: An agent A performs an action X akratically iff a) A does X intentionally, b) A believes that there is an alternative action Y open to A, and c) A judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do Y than X.
Now consider the following three principles:
P1: If A wants to do X more than she wants to do Y and she believes herself free to do either X or Y, then A will intentionally do X if she does either X or Y intentionally.
P2: If A judges that it would be better to do X than to do Y, then she wants to do X more than she wants to do Y.
P3: There are akratic actions.
The problem of Akrasia can be restated thusly: P1, P2, and P3 are true but contradictory. That is, each principle is true, but together they imply a contradiction. Hence they cannot all be true.
In at most two pages, following the usual requirements, viz.,
- No less than 10pt font.
- No less than 1.5 line spacing.
- No less than 1 inch margins on all sides.
- No more than two pages, numbered and stapled, for this problem set.
- A header line which has "Problem Set 08", the date, and your name at the very top of the page.
explain your own example you can recall where you yourself have acted akratically and use that example to answer, as clearly as you can, the following three questions:
- How does your example of akrasia satisfy definition (D) above?
- How does your example show that (P1), (P2), and (P3) are contradictory?
- Were you nevertheless responsible for your (akratic) action in the example?