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The Lures of Akrasia1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
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Abstract

There is more to akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 167 - 181
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

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Footnotes

1

My preference for retaining the Greek term akrasia is not an arcane taste for the esoteric: it arises from my conviction that the standard English translations – weakness of will, incontinence, backsliding, moral weakness – are, as we shall see, profoundly misleading.

References

2 Their story echoes that of Paolo and Francesa's lament as Dante tells it in the Inferno. Canto V.

3 See Stocker, Michael, ‘Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology’, Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 738–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Rorty, Amelie, ‘Akratic Belief’, American Philosophic Quarterly (1983): 175–183 Google Scholar.

5 I am grateful to Robert Frederick for raising this point.

6 See Wiggins, David, ‘Weakness of Will, Deliberation and Practical Reason’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1973–4): 29–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and his ‘Weakness of Will, Commensurability and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 79 (1978–79): 251–277 Google Scholar

7 See Davidson, Donald, ‘How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 21–42 Google Scholar.; Holton, Richard, Willing, Wanting, Waiting, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mele, Alfred, Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of Will, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stroud, Sarah and Tappolet, Christine (eds) Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Margalit, Avishai, On Compromise And Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar and his Betrayal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

9 See Rorty, Amelie, ‘The Political Sources of the Emotions: Greed and Anger’, Philosophical Studies (1998), 143–159 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Elster, Jon, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds, (Chichester/New York/Brisbane/Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1978)Google Scholar, Chapters 5 and 6

11 See Rorty, Amelie, ‘How to Become Corrupt’, Yale Review (1998) 104–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 See Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Group, 1963)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Anthony O'Hear for recommending a different analysis of Eichmann, one that interprets him as fully, non-akratically committed to his role in the Holocaust. See Stagneth, Bettina (Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014))Google Scholar.  See also Sartre, J-P., ‘Childhood of a Leader’, The Wall (New York: New Directions, 1948)Google Scholar, 84 ff., originally in Le Mur (Paris: Gallimard, 1939)Google Scholar.

13 See Haslanger, Sally, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice, Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.