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Philosophical ideas
What are we to make of weakness of the will?
The technical term is akrasia. Is there such a thing? If so, what is it, and how does it affect our lives?
Back when I was a graduate student in philosophy, at the University of Tennessee, a fellow student brought up — in between shots of vodkas we were having after our regular evening class on ethics — the question of akrasia, or weakness of the will. She was concise and confident: it doesn’t exist.
My first reaction was: are you crazy? Of course there is weakness of the will! I suffer from it all the time. For instance when I join you after class and — against my better judgment — drink a bit too much. For which unwise decision I sometimes pay with a bit of a headache the morning after.
I then realized that we were enacting a debate that was close to two and a half millennia old, with my friend playing the part of Socrates and I that of Aristotle.
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates explicitly says that “No one goes willingly toward the bad” (358d), meaning that we don’t consciously choose to act against our own better judgment. When we appear to be doing so, Socrates argues, it’s because we are ignorant of some pertinent facts. Ignorance, the famous Platonic phrase…
