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occurs when a persons attitudes fail to conform to his or her own judgments (p. 25).
I will follow this usage and reserve the term irrational for especially egregious rational failures.
2
Philip Pettit and Michael Smith emphasize the importance of identifying a
distinctively practical form of rational failure in Practical Unreason, Mind, cii (1993):
5379.
3
R. Jay Wallace, Three Conceptions of Rational Agency, Ethical Theory and Moral
Practice, ii (1999): 21742. Robert Audi observes that one reason for taking incontinent
actions to be irrational is that they seem to manifest a malfunction: the will is not
carrying out its proper functionto produce conformity between action and practical
reasonWeakness of Will and Rational Action, chapter 12 of Action, Intention, and
Reason (Ithaca: Cornell, 1993), p. 324.
4
In Practical Unreason, Pettit and Smith describe rational action as action in which
motivation conforms to the results of deliberation not as a result of blind obedience,
but through sensitivity to the values that lead to choice: The values that weigh with
the agent in deliberation serve also to arouse a desire for the option which they
deliberatively support. Their net impact on arousing desiretheir net desiderative
forcecorresponds to their net deliberative weight (p. 57).
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5
Similar accounts have been provided by Thomas Hill, Weakness of Will and
Character, in Autonomy and Self-respect (New York: Cambridge, 1991), pp. 11837; and
Richard Holton, Intention and Weakness of Will, this journal, xcvi, 5 (May 1999):
24162.
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they can be very hard to tell apart, even when the agent is oneself.
(Did you retain the judgment that it would have been best to stop
at the end of the chapter as you read the first sentence of the next
chapter? Or had you already revised your judgment about what would
be best by then?) Second, the rationalizing agent is deficient in some
central respect involving motivation. If the defect in weakness of will
involves a failure to contain recalcitrant motives, then rationalizing
agents seem to display it also. Yet rationalizing need not involve
weakness of will: the rationalizing agent might revise her judgment
about what is best sufficiently far in advance so that she does not, even
for a moment, flout the earlier judgment in action. If the Obedience
View is correct and practical rationality is simply compliance with
evaluative judgment, the rationalizing agent shows no lapse in practical rationality since compliance is perfectly preserved. (By changing
her mind, the rationalizing agent has neatly disposed of the evidence
she would require to indict herself of irrationality.) This verdict seems
to conflict with the intuitive thought that if the rationalizing agent
had displayed more strength of will, she would not have succumbed
to the temptation to revise her judgment about what is best.
Those who hold the Obedience View might say that this is no
objection to their view since rationalizing involves a defect in a
different department, theoretical rationality, and need not involve a
lapse in practical rationality. An agent who rationalizes a failure to do
what she had intended by changing her mind about what would be
best does not have good reason to do so, since she revises the
judgment on the basis of somethingher failure to be motivated to
comply with itthat has no evidential value. By contrast, they might
remark, a lucid weak-willed agent who does not lose her grip on what
would be best because of her reluctance to act, does not display this
defect in theoretical rationality, but because she fails to be motivated
to act on the judgment she currently holds, she displays a form of
practical irrationality. The two failures might be causally linkedan
akratic practical failure might prompt the rationalizing theoretical
failurebut the defects displayed are utterly distinct.
Yet when we compare the rationalizing late-night reader and the
akratic late-night reader, the akratic seems to be doing better than the
rationalizer in containing her reluctance to stop reading. In some
respect concerning motivation, she is doing better, yet the obedience
view says that she is doing worse. Furthermore, the lucidly akratic
agents resistance to the temptation to rationalize a change of mind
seems to be just the kind of thing that generally produces strength
of will. If resisting the urge to rationalize is just displaying strength
in the domain of theoretical rationality, and if people are often
288
6
Broome, Reason and Motivation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume lxxi (1997): 13146.
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7
See Nomy Arpaly, On Acting Rationally against Ones Better Judgment, Ethics, cx
(April 2000): 488513; Audi, Weakness of Will and Rational Action; and my paper Is
Weakness of Will Always Irrational? in Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty, eds., Identity,
Character, and Morality (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), pp. 379400. Hill provides a refreshingly
broad characterization of weakness of will in Weakness of Will and Character which
would include rationalization as a manifestation of it, but his account of the defect in
weakness of will makes it depend upon the irrationality of making or breaking
the resolutions involved. A somewhat similar distinction between procedural and substantive dimensions of rationality is drawn by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Motivation,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume lxxi (1997): 98130.
8
This contrasts sharply with Allan Gibbards use of the term rational in Wise Choices,
Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard,1990) as a term of art to
express the sense in which what it is rational to do settles what to do (p. 49). Gibbard
290
acknowledges that other phrases, like the best thing to do or the thing to do might
capture this notion better when it is applied to questions of action (p. 49).
weakness of will
291
9
In Weakness of Will and Character, Hill describes weakness of will in even broader
terms. On his account it is a character trait that manifests itself in a failure to make
resolutions or to persevere in carrying them out: weak-willed persons are the sort of
persons who repeatedly and more than normal (a) make inadequate efforts, (b) resolve
with too little determination, (c) break their resolutions, with or without a struggle,
and/or (d) too readily abandon their undertakings (p. 130).
10
Simon Blackburn asks: Isnt it more plausible to say that when we are weak-willed
we change our mind, perhaps for bad reasons, about what we ought to do? In fact, the
better the grounds we have for calling an episode of weakness of will voluntary and noncompulsive, the more it looks like a change of mindRuling Passions: A Theory of
Practical Reasoning (New York: Oxford, 1998), p. 191.
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22
Thanks to Veronica Ponce and Michael Smith for persuasion on this point.
See Audi, Weakness of Will and Rational Action, p. 329; and also Arpaly, On
Acting Rationally against Ones Best Judgment, p. 491.
23
300
Some will maintain that the defect in such cases is only in the
drafting of the unwise or ill-considered resolution, and so is a failure
of theoretical rationality. Against this, I want to maintain that the badly
drafted resolution and its failure to defeat contrary inclination both
constitute failures of practical rationality. This second defect may seem
negligibly small in an isolated case, but its significance will be obvious
when such failures are part of a pattern in which resolutions are
routinely formed only to be abandoned once it is apparent that it
would not be reasonable to carry them out. Suppose that a student
were to look back and note with satisfaction that each time she had
formed a resolution to stay up all night to write a philosophy essay and
then abandoned that resolution in the wee hours, stupefied by fatigue,
a greater coherence in her overall attitudes had been produced, one
which better reflected her updated estimate of the difficulty of the task
and the extent of her capacities to carry it out. Something important
would be missing. A technique of self-management, the forming of
resolutions, had failed to work repeatedly, and although the failure of
the technique might be traced ultimately to a failure in draftsmanship,
the two are not entirely independent. Often a pattern of failure is
what constitutes the defect in draftsmanship. If the student had been
the kind of person who thrived under such conditions, there would
have been nothing wrong with her resolutions.
Since the defect in failures to be resolute just is the defeat of a
resolution by contrary inclination of the sort anticipated; the defect
remains even if it is a good thing, from some broader point of view,
that the defeat occurred. A failure to be resolute is the failure of a
technique of self-management: the formation of a contrary inclination defeating intention. A self that misuses a technique of selfmanagement by forming an unreasonable resolution may well be
managing herself more skillfully later on by revising the intention
rather than by carrying it out. Because of this, failures to be resolute are
not always cases of failed self-management. Perhaps failures to be resolute are typically cases of failed self-management, but they are necessarily only the failure of a certain technique of self-management.
To describe a failure to be resolute as a case of weakness of will
seems to involve a stronger form of condemnation. I suggest that the
best account of the pejorative force in the term weakness of will characterizes it as a failure to be resolute that is criticizable because the
agent had good reason to carry out the resolution. It is impossible to
provide a schematic account of the nature of these grounds for criticism since these rest on substantive claims about what the agent had
good reason to do. Still, the grounds for criticism of episodes of
weakness of will do not consist in or even require the possession of
weakness of will
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302
24
Some have argued that weak-willed actions must be distinguished from compulsive actions by considering the agents capacity to act in accordance with her judgments;
for example, Jeanette Kennett and Smith in Philosophy and Commonsense: The Case
of Weakness of Will, in Michaelis Michael and John OLeary-Hawthorne, eds., Philosophy in Mind (Boston: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 14157. It seems plausible to say that powerful
inclinations that ensure the defeat of a resolution do not keep the episode from being
a failure to be resolute, but might keep it from being criticizable, and as a result,
might keep it from counting as weakness of will. Since resolutions are ineffective techniques for achieving self-control in the presence of powerful compulsive desires, agents
who experience inner compulsion might not form such resolutions; in such cases,
they might be akratic, without being eligible to be weak-willed.
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304
followed fairly consistently on future occasions. Therefore, a welldrafted personal policy must sustain the belief that one can comply
with it in the future, since present compliance with the policy makes
sense only if it is part of a larger pattern of compliance. This explains
why a failure to be resolute might have some evidential bearing on
the wisdom of a particular policy. In section v I maintained that a
pattern of failures to comply with a policy can constitute a serious
procedural defect. However, a single failure to comply with a personal policy need not be taken as evidence that it requires too much
of us and should be revised. In fact, a policy designed to promote
self-control may be insufficiently demanding if it is followed with
unfailing obedience. George Ainslie has pointed out that a good
reason to resist the drafting of a loophole to a policy in order to
license an imminent failure to comply with it is that a tendency to
grant ourselves such exemptions can reduce our expectation of
future compliance. How can we assure ourselves that we will say
just this once just once?26 These considerations converge to support the somewhat surprising conclusion that flat-out akratic failures to comply with a policy can play an entirely benign role in the
lives of rational agents by serving as an escape valve for the pressures
created by policies that are worth maintaining, unamended, despite
occasional failures to comply with them and despite the temptation
to make exceptions to the policy to ratify giving in to the current
temptation. Evaluative stability in the face of the desires that tempt
one and lucidity about the fact that those desires do not constitute
good reasons to revise ones policy are manifestations of practical
rationality, and they can be displayed even when one fails to be
resolute in following a policy.
vii. is akratic weakness of will specially irrational?
Someone who holds the standard view according to which the central
defect in weakness of will rests on the irrationality of the weak-willed
agents akratic attitudes might make this observation:
What you call a non-akratic failure to be resolute is not usually classified
as weakness of will because it does not involve akrasia and it may not even
be criticizable, since the presumption favoring resoluteness might be
defeated in particular cases. As a result, I dont object to your claim that
26
Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (New York: Cambridge, 2001), p. 87. For further discussion of Ainslies stronger claim that past compliance gives us a reason to comply in
the future, see Bratman, Planning and Temptation, in Larry May, Marilyn Friedman,
and Andy Clark, eds., Mind and Morals (Cambridge: MIT, 1996), pp. 293310; and
Alfred Mele, Addiction and Self-control, Behavior and Philosophy, xxiv, 2 (Fall 1996):
99117.
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The objector need not claim that akratic weakness of will constitutes a distinctively practical form of irrationality, as someone who
holds the obedience view might claim. The objector might appeal
to something quite different, what I will call the rational connections
view. According to this, an akratic agents attitudes are irrational
simply because they manifest rational incoherence.27 Since this feature can be manifested in the theoretical realm as well, no special
distinction between practical rationality and theoretical rationality
need be drawn to identify and condemn it.28 Weakness of will would
count as practical rather than theoretical irrationality only because
it concerns deliberation and reasoning that support the formation
and carrying out of intentions.
What is the rational connection between judging that you ought to
do x instead of y, forming the intention to do x, and carrying it out?
John Broome comments that if you judge that you ought to do x, and
you do not intend to do x, then you are not entirely as you ought to be
because your judgment normatively requires the corresponding
27
306
29
Broome, Normative Requirements, in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Normativity (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 7899, on p. 85.
30
Normative Requirements, p. 89, and Normative Practical Reasoning, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume lxxv (2001): 17593.
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31
This is a case in which the agents incapacity to comply with a rational requirement
does not provide any reason to think that the requirement does not apply, but it does
provide a reason to think that the failure to comply should not count as irrationality.
See Wallace, Three Conceptions of Rational Agency, p. 231, for a sustained discussion
of possible grounds for maintaining the existence of rational requirements even in the
face of such apparent rational incapacities as weakness of will.
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(ii) they have good reason to carry out their resolutions. Although
they deserve criticism for their failure to be resolute, they might not
be in a position to see that this is the case because they have revised
their original judgment about what would be best (or have simply
abandoned it without revising it) when faced with a motivational
failure. This is what distinguishes non-akratic weak-willed agents from
akratic weak-willed agents, and though it explains why the non-akratic
weak-willed agents are not in a position to indict themselves of irrationality, it does not show that they are doing better in some regard
concerning practical rationality. And there is a perspective from
which they seem to be doing worse. Often we are not in a good position to know whether our misgivings about carrying out some plan
give us reason to reconsider or revise it. It would be better to have a
tendency to be resolute in such circumstances than to have a tendency to reconsider or revise our plan. Similarly, when we do fail to
carry out a resolution, it would be better to have a tendency to hold
on to our original evaluative judgment in the face of uncertainty
about the evidential value of our reluctance to act than to have a tendency to revise our judgment. And if we do in fact have such general
tendencies that concern our evaluative judgments, it might be useful
to treat uncertainty about the reasonableness of revising the judgment underlying a resolution as a reason against revising the judgment, especially when one is powerfully inclined not to carry it out.
But then an akratic failure to be resolute would not be clearly worse
than a non-akratic failure to be resolute in the face of such uncertainty.
The objector might concede this point, while maintaining that it
holds only when we are uncertain about the credentials of the
resolution that was not carried out. The objector might then press on,
urging us to consider cases in which we are in an excellent epistemic
position to see that the judgment underlying the resolution is one
that should not be doubted and that the presumption in favor of
resoluteness holds. Suppose that you have resolved to resist an inclination that you expect to be quite compelling despite the fact that
there is so little to be said for it that it can be dismissed as a tempting
illusion. Despite your resolution you are taken in by the strangely
compelling inclination. Suppose that you were to observe this happening in yourself with perfect lucidity. Not only do you act against
your better judgment here, you do so despite the fact that you are in
an excellent position to see that what you judged best really is best,
and that what you resolved to resist and are now failing to resist really
is an illusory sort of temptation. You have failed to be resolute despite
the fact that you are in an excellent position to appreciate that you
have every reason to be resolute.
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35
In response to Cardinal Newmans comment It is almost a definition of a
gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain (in The Idea of a University), the
additional qualification unintentionally has been attributed to Wilde, but also to G.K.
Chesterton, Oliver Herford, and to Osbert Sitwell, Edith Sitwells brother.