| 22511 | Some reasonings are stronger than we are [Philolaus] |
| Full Idea: Some reasonings are stronger than we are. | |
| From: Philolaus (fragments/reports [c.425 BCE]), quoted by Aristotle - Eudemian Ethics 1225a33 | |
| A reaction: This endorses the Aristotle view of akrasia (as opposed to the Socratic view). This isolated remark seems to imply that we are more clearly embodiments of will than of reason. |
| 5843 | People do what they think they should do, and only ever do what they think they should do [Socrates, by Xenophon] |
| Full Idea: There is no one who knows what they ought to do, but thinks that they ought not to do it, and no one does anything other than what they think they ought to do. | |
| From: report of Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]) by Xenophon - Memorabilia of Socrates 4.6.6 | |
| A reaction: This is Socrates' well-known rejection of the possibility of weakness of will (akrasia - lit. 'lack of control'). Aristotle disagreed, and so does almost everyone else. Modern smokers seem to exhibit akrasia. I have some sympathy with Socrates. |
| 5253 | Socrates was shocked by the idea of akrasia, but observation shows that it happens [Aristotle on Socrates] |
| Full Idea: Socrates thought it a shocking idea that when a man actually has knowledge in him something else should overmaster it, ..but this is glaringly inconsistent with the observed facts. | |
| From: comment on Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]) by Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics 1145b24 | |
| A reaction: Aristotle seems very confident, but it is not at all clear (even to the agent) what is going on when apparent weakness of will occurs (e.g. breaking a diet). What exactly does the agent believe at the moment of weakness? |
| 195 | No one willingly commits an evil or base act [Socrates] |
| Full Idea: I am fairly certain that no wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetrates any evil or base act. | |
| From: Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 345e |
| 199 | The common belief is that people can know the best without acting on it [Socrates] |
| Full Idea: Most people think there are many who recognise the best but are unwilling to act on it. | |
| From: Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 352d |
| 1653 | Socrates did not accept the tripartite soul (which permits akrasia) [Vlastos on Socrates] |
| Full Idea: Xenophon indirectly indicates that he does not associate Socrates in any way with the tripartite psychology of the 'Republic', for within that theory akrasia would be all too possible. | |
| From: comment on Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]) by Gregory Vlastos - Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher p.102 |
| 24060 | Self-controlled follow understanding, when it is opposed to desires [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Self-controlled people, even when they desire and have an appetite for things, do not do these things for which they have the desire, but instead follow the understanding. | |
| From: Aristotle (De Anima [c.329 BCE], 433a06) | |
| A reaction: If modern discussions would stop talking of 'weakness of will', and talk instead of 'control' and its lack, the whole issue would become clearer. Akrasia is then seen, for example, as an action of the whole person, not of some defective part. |
| 4383 | Aristotle seems not to explain why the better syllogism is overcome in akratic actions [Burnyeat on Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle's discussion of akrasia seems to leave the vital point unexplained, which is why the better syllogism is overcome. | |
| From: comment on Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1102b14) by Myles F. Burnyeat - Aristotle on Learning to be Good p.85 | |
| A reaction: The problem is where exactly the action originates within us - is it sometimes from deliberation, and sometimes from some irrational force? Either akrasia is easy and action baffling, or vice versa. |
| 68 | The akrates acts from desire not choice, and the enkrates acts from choice not desire [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The incontinent man (weak-willed, 'akrates') acts from desire but not from choice, but the continent man (controlled, 'enkrates') acts from choice but not from desire. | |
| From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1111b14) | |
| A reaction: These two categories are contrasted with the truly wicked and the truly good, in both of whom choice and desire work together. The akrates and the enkrates include most people, hovering in the middle ground of moral apprenticeship. |
| 4318 | Virtue is right reason and feeling and action. Akrasia and enkrateia are lower levels of action. [Aristotle, by Cottingham] |
| Full Idea: Morality rises from vice (bad reason, bad feeling, bad action), to akrasia ('no control', but get the reason right), to enkrateia (wrong feeling, but right reason and action), culminating in virtue (right feeling, as well as right reason and action). | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1111b15) by John Cottingham - Reason, Emotions and Good Life p.1 | |
| A reaction: Very illuminating, especially for showing the importance of feeling in Aristotle's account. True virtue is effortless, not steely control. This has to be right, and seems to differ from Kant. |
| 4372 | Akrasia merely neglects or misunderstands knowledge, rather than opposing it [Achtenberg on Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: According to Aristotle, the incontinent person never acts against active knowledge of particulars, but either acts against knowledge that is possessed but not exercised, or knowledge that is not fully possessed, or against knowledge of universals alone. | |
| From: comment on Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1111b15) by Deborah Achtenberg - Cognition of Value in Aristotle's Ethics 2.1 | |
| A reaction: This comments aims to bring Aristotle closer to Socrates (who says virtue IS reason), and it certainly fits with the high value which Aristotle normally places on reason. |
| 5254 | Some people explain akrasia by saying only opinion is present, not knowledge [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Some thinkers say that when some people are unable to resist pleasures then what they have is not knowledge but only opinion. | |
| From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1145b33) | |
| A reaction: You would have thought that people take their own opinions for knowledge, but Aristotle seems to refer to weakly held beliefs. Aristotle allows that this might excuse mild misbehaviour, but not true vice. |
| 5255 | A person may act against one part of his knowledge, if he knows both universal and particular [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: It is quite possible for a person who has knowledge of both universal and particular to act inconsistently with his knowledge, if he is exercising knowledge of the universal but not of the particular. | |
| From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1147a01) | |
| A reaction: In this way Aristotle says (at 1147b15) that he can agree with Socrates about akrasia. I.e. that the evil deed does indeed arise from some sort of ignorance (perhaps of the relevant particular), and not just from desire. |
| 23317 | Aristotle sees akrasia as acting against what is chosen, not against reason [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle explicitly characterises akrasia cases as ones in which one acts against one's choices [prohairesis], rather than as cases in which one chooses to act against reason. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1148a09) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 2 | |
| A reaction: The point is that Socrates and Plato give reason top authority, and Aristotle is not undermining that. Akrasia is a mistake at a lower level. Frede's discussion is subtle! |
| 23318 | Akrasia is explained by past mental failures, not by a specific choice [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: It is past failures (of training, discipline, reflection…), rather than a specific mental event, a choice or a decision, which in Aristotle accounts for akratic action. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1148a10) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 2 | |
| A reaction: This is to demonstrate that Aristotle has no concept of a 'will' which arbitrates over difficult choices. What we call 'willing' he applies only to choices which are rational. |
| 5257 | Licentious people feel no regret, but weak-willed people are capable of repentance [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The licentious man is unrepentant, because he abides by his choice; but the incontinent (weak-willed) man is always capable of repentance. | |
| From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1150b28) | |
| A reaction: This is the very important feature of virtue theory - that what happens AFTER the action is almost as important as what happens before and during it. Character can be revealed just as much by pride or regret for an action. |
| 23918 | Akrasia is the clash of two feelings - goodness and pleasure [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The discord between the good and the pleasant in one's feelings is lack of self-control. | |
| From: Aristotle (Eudemian Ethics [c.333 BCE], 1237a08) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of his view, which opposes the view of Socrates that akrasia is a failure of reason or judgement. Goodness seems to be treated here as a feeling, which is unusual. |
| 22574 | A community can lack self-control [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: If lack of self-control exists at the level of a single individual, it also exists at the level of a city. | |
| From: Aristotle (Politics [c.332 BCE], 1310a17) | |
| A reaction: A nice extension of the problem of akrasia. Was Britain declaring war in 1914 an act of akrasia? With hindsight it looks that way. Strong emotions about Belgium overcame sensible concern for the young men of Britain. |
| 20850 | Passions are judgements; greed thinks money is honorable, and likewise drinking and lust [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Chrysippus says (in his On Passions) that the passions are judgements; for greed is a supposition that money is honorable, and similarly for drunkennes and wantonness and others. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.111 | |
| A reaction: This is an endorsement of Socrates's intellectualist reading of weakness of will, as against Aristotle's assigning it to overpowering passions. |
| 19365 | Limited awareness leads to bad choices, and unconscious awareness makes us choose the bad [Leibniz, by Perkins] |
| Full Idea: For Leibniz, while the limits of our knowledge explain why we sometimes choose things we think are good but which turn out to be bad, the force of minute perceptions explains why we sometimes choose things that we know are bad. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 4.IV | |
| A reaction: To be overwhelmed by selfish greed doesn't sound like a 'minute perception'. Leibniz thinks all desires are reactions to perceptions. Observing our degrees of knowledge is an interesting response to the intellectualist view of weakness of will. |
| 22098 | Socrates neglects the gap between knowing what is good and doing good [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: There is a fundamental weakness in Socrates, that he does not take into account the gap between knowing what is good and actually putting this into action. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 5 | |
| A reaction: This rejects Socrates's intellectualism about weakness of will. It is perhaps a better criticism that Aristotle's view that desires sometimes overcome the will. It is also the problem of motivation in Kantian deontology. Or utilitarianism. |
| 24117 | We need lower and higher drives, but they must be under firm control [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: All lower drives must be present and have fresh force if the highest ones want to exist and exist in abundance: but control of the whole must be in firm hands! otherwise the danger is too great. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 14[03]) | |
| A reaction: This is unusual, because he speaks of the Self as little more than the currently dominant drive, but here he postulates a controller of the drives, a ringmaster. A-krasia means lack of control. Nietzsche wants en-krateia. |
| 7209 | There is no will; weakness of will is splitting of impulses, strong will is coordination under one impulse [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Weakness of will is misleading, for there is no will, and hence neither a strong will nor a weak one. Multiplicity and disaggregation of the impulses results as 'weak will'; coordination under the dominance of a single one results as 'strong will'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[219]) | |
| A reaction: That Nietzsche seems to be right is clearer if we remember that the Greek terms are 'control' (enkrateia) and 'lack of control' (akrasia), with no reference to anything called the will. |
| 23878 | Weakness of will is the inadequacy of the original impetus to carry through the action [Weil] |
| Full Idea: It is naïve to be astonished when we do not stick to firm resolutions. Something stimulated the resolution, but that something was not powerful enough to bring us to the point of carrying it out. Making the resolution may even have exhausted the stimulus. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Is There a Marxist Doctrine? [1943], p.169) | |
| A reaction: Socrates says it is a change of belief. Aristotle says it is a desire overcoming a belief. Weil gives a third way: that it is a fading in the strength of the original belief/desire impetus. |
| 6385 | The causally strongest reason may not be the reason the actor judges to be best [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: I defend my causal view of action by arguing that a reason that is causally strongest need not be a reason deemed by the actor to provide the strongest (best) grounds for acting. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Intro to 'Essays on Actions and Events' [1980], p.xii) | |
| A reaction: If I smoke a cigarette against my better judgement, it is not clear to me how the desire to smoke it, which overcomes my judgement not to smoke it, counts as the causally strongest 'reason'. We seem to have two different senses of 'reason' here. |
| 4317 | We judge weakness of will by an assessment after the event is concluded [Williams,B, by Cottingham] |
| Full Idea: Williams has shown that whether an action was weakness of will depends on an evaluation after the event, as in the question of whether Gauguin was right to abandon his family to pursue his art. | |
| From: report of Bernard Williams (Shame and Necessity [1993]) by John Cottingham - Reason, Emotions and Good Life p.1 | |
| A reaction: The 'Gauguin Problem' is that Gauguin's actions only become weakness of will if the pictures are no good, and he can't know that till he's painted them. Good point. |
| 23996 | Akrasia is intelligible in hindsight, when we revisit our previous emotions [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: To make my emotion intelligible [in a weakness of will case] is to look back and recognise that my emotions and dispositions were not quite as I had taken them to be. It is quite useless in such a case to invoke a blanket diagnosis of 'irrationality'. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Ruling Passions [1998], p.191) | |
| A reaction: So Blackburn rejects the idea of akrasia, because there was never really a conflict. He says rational people always aim to maximise their utility (p.135), and if their own act surprises them, it is just a failure to understand their own rationality. |
| 4355 | There may be inverse akrasia, where the agent's action is better than their judgement recommends [Hursthouse] |
| Full Idea: There seem to be cases of 'inverse akrasia', in which the course of action actually followed is superior to the course of action recommended by the agent's best judgement. | |
| From: Rosalind Hursthouse (On Virtue Ethics [1999], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This must occur, as when an assassin lets his victim off, and then regrets the deed. It strengthens the case against Socrates, and in favour of their being two parts of the soul which compete to motivate our actions. |
| 23995 | Akrasia can be either overruling our deliberation, or failing to deliberate [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: I call it 'last ditch' akrasia when we deliberately decide to do something, and then don't do it, and 'impetuous' akrasia when we rush into doing something which, if we had deliberated, we would not have done. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that his impetuous version counts as akrasia, which seems to be vice of people who deliberate. [But he cites Aristotle 1150b19-]. |
| 20077 | If you can judge one act as best, then do another, this supports an inward-looking view of agency [Stout,R] |
| Full Idea: Weakness of will is a threat to the outward-looking approach to agency. It seems you can hold one thing to be the thing to do, and at the same time do something else. Many regard this as a decisive reason to follow a more inward-looking approach. | |
| From: Rowland Stout (Action [2005], 8 'Weakness') | |
| A reaction: It hadn't struck me before that weakness of will is a tool for developing an accurate account of what is involved in normal agency. Some facts that guide action are internal to the agent, such as greed for sugary cakes. |