The Hard Problem of Weakness of Will.

1 The Hard Problem Of Weakness Of Will. What is really problematic about the notion of weakness of will? As we shall see, there are many things that might naturally be regarded as cases of weakness of will that are in no way puzzling or paradoxical: one is not at all inclined to wonder whether they are really possible. But there is – or at least seems to be – a recalcitrant core of cases that are very puzzling indeed. It is on these that I wish to focus. In fact, this paper will be largely concerned with this focusing and will not propose any solution to or dissolution of the problem. There is plenty of work to be done here and I hope the paper will be of use as an introduction to the problem to students of philosophy who may know it only in broad outline. David Chalmers has spoken of the hard problem of consciousness.1 The problem of weakness of will is perhaps only a second-rank philosophical problem in comparison with that of the relationship between consciousness and the physical, but it is not without importance and it resembles it in that there is a need for considerable preliminary work getting at, digging out, what it is that is the real enigma.2 I shall base my discussion on Donald Davidson’s formulation.3 This has long struck me as an object-lesson in how to formulate a philosophical problem clearly and precisely. Over the years I have come to feel the need for some supplementation but that doesn’t diminish its usefulness as a starting point. In fact it seems to me that I am simply trying to focus more precisely – increase the magnification on – the problem that Davidson has already got clearly in view. Before proceeding further, just consider a few single-sentence formulations, ones that might appear as essay titles or examination questions: a) Is it possible for one to do other than what one there and then thinks best? b) If someone thinks it better to do A than to do B, yet intentionally does B, does this mean that he could not have done A? c) If someone decides that it would be better to do A than B, might she still freely choose to do B? d) If I decide that A is the right thing to do in the situation I am now in, might I, without changing my mind about this, nevertheless do something else? I would like readers simply to ponder these questions and note their reactions to them. I would also ask those who have already given some thought to the problem to note that they are in some ways more general than would be questions based on discussions of the issue in Plato and Aristotle or on the work of modern moral philosophers for whom weakness of will has been a problem, such as R. M. Hare.4 1. Davidson’s conditions for what weakness of will has to be. When I say that I shall base my discussion on Davidson’s formulation, this might in one way be misleading. Davidson presents the problem as arising from a conflict between two intuitively plausible principles and the claim that there is weakness of will.5 While this is useful in some ways, I think it makes the problem seem unduly abstract. I prefer to direct attention straight at something seemingly paradoxical that is part of virtually6 everyone’s experience. Davidson’s conditions for weakness of will serve this purpose admirably. I shall take them roughly in the order in which Davidson introduces them. Some are negative conditions, concerned with what weakness of will does not necessarily have to be. 2 a) ‘An agent’s will is weak, if he acts, and acts intentionally, counter to his own better judgment’.7 This is spelt out further as: ‘If a man holds some course of action to be the best one, everything considered, or the right one, or the thing he ought to do, and yet does something else, he acts incontinently [is weak-willed in performing that action]’.8 The point is that the agent has to perform an action, while believing it to be better to do something else. It is of course not sufficient that he just have some reason for doing something else; otherwise every action performed in the light of conflicting reasons would count as weak-willed.9 b) Sometimes the problem of weakness of will is formulated in terms of whether it is possible for an agent to act contrary to what he knows is best (as it was when it was first noticed by the Greeks). Davidson points out that this is too restrictive. One would be weak-willed in acting against what one believes is best – even if this belief is false or even if there is no such thing as truth and falsity in this region and hence no possibility of knowledge.10 c) A weak-willed action must be intentional, i.e. it is not weakness of will if one unintentionally goes against what one thinks best.11 I shall have little to add to what Davidson says on this point except to note that care must be taken with its formulation. The above formulation – ‘A weak-willed action must be intentional’ – might (somewhat perversely) be taken as requiring that a weak-willed action must be one that the agent performs with the express purpose of flouting his own better judgment, to snub or spite himself as it were.12 Let us say that the weak-willed action must be intentional and the agent must be aware that it goes against his own better judgment. d) A point that Davidson makes only in passing, in a footnote, seems to me of great importance: [W]eakness of will does not require that the alternative action actually be available, only that the agent think it is.13 It is weak-willed to light up a cigarette, thinking it would be better not to do so, and also thinking it within one’s power not to do so (whether or not it actually is). This seems to be the sort of case that raises the problem of weakness of will: such a choice is puzzling, problematic, paradoxical. I suggest that Davidson could have gone further. It is not necessary for us to have a puzzling case that the agent believe he could perform the better action, only that he not believe that he couldn’t. More of this later. e) In being weak-willed one does not have to be acting against one’s moral principles: In approaching the problem of incontinence it is a good idea to dwell on the cases where morality simply doesn’t enter the picture as one of the contestants for our favour – or if it does, it is on the wrong side.14 I am at one with him on this. On the whole I find prudential examples (e.g. unsuccessfully trying to give up smoking, to cut down on one’s drinking, to keep to a diet) clearer examples of weakness of will than moral ones. Furthermore, there is a kind of case that is neither prudential nor moral that I shall be emphasising. f) In (e) I spoke of moral principles. Perhaps it is worth stating explicitly that a weakwilled action does not have to go against general principles, if by ‘general principles’ 3 one means principles of the form ‘Always perform such-and-such a type of action if you have the opportunity’ or ‘Never under any circumstances do X’. I can, it seems, lie in bed thinking it would be better to get up without having any general principle about always getting up at or before a certain time.15 g) It needs, I think, to be stated explicitly that a weak-willed action has to be motivated. The agent must have a reason for what he does or, if it is a case where he fails to act, he must have a reason for that.16 If someone claimed to have a reason for doing something and to believe himself able to do it and to have no reason not to do it and yet did not do it, I do not think we would accept this. I am not certain about this and it is not entirely clear how we ought to describe the case. We would, I think, be tempted to postulate unconscious resistances or a strange, momentary inability to act. But surely we would not consider the agent’s failure to act as weakness of will. Does it not seem far more alien than that? At any rate, I shall have no more to say about this sort of case. 2. Davidson’s Conditions Scrutinised. I shall now look at those of Davidson’s conditions that seem to need amplification or that other philosophers might find questionable. Two of them at least, (b) and (d), are not self-evident and might arouse resistance. Being able and believing one is able. When Davidson says that it is only necessary that the weak-willed agent believe that the action he thinks best but fails to perform is available to him, not that it actually is available, it might be wondered how this relates to the problem of freewill. Are we ever able to do anything other than what we do do? Is he perhaps tacitly making some assumption about this issue? Is he perhaps presupposing the compatibilism he confidently (to my mind rather too confidently) accepts elsewhere?17 I am not sure but I think it can be shown that he does not need to make any such controversial assumption and that seeing why is a major step towards getting the problem of weakness of will clearly in focus. Imagine someone lighting up a cigarette, thinking as she does so how much better it would be to give up smoking and that she really ought to do so. She does not, so to speak, call her own bluff by her action. She does not read off from her action the disjunctive proposition: Either I do not really believe that it would be better to give up or I am unable to stop.18 There are no doubt philosophers who believe that she ought to draw this conclusion, but it seems that she need not do so without this reflecting adversely on her intelligence or ability to see simple logical connexions. Even if there is something logically amiss with her smoking, thinking it better not to smoke and believing herself able not to, this is not self-evident. As already noted, it may be not so much that she believes that she could refrain from smoking as that she does not believe that she couldn’t. Perhaps she is aware of the possibility that she is so seriously addicted that she could not refrain. But she is not forced by the contemplation of her own action to conclude that either she is thus addicted or that she does not really think it better to refrain. So it looks as though we can for present purposes set aside the traditional freewill problem: Are we ever able to act in a way other than the way in which we do act?19 Lest there be any lingering doubt about this, let me offer this further consideration. 4 The believer in freewill (libertarian or compatibilist) is not committed to the view that we are never mistaken in thinking ourselves able to do something. He can accept that sometimes people are unable to refrain from certain actions, such as smoking.20 And presumably he can also accept that sometimes such people mistakenly believe that they can refrain. (At least I cannot see any reason why not.) Our smoker may not realise she is addicted to nicotine, for example. So a believer in freewill who turns his attention to the problem of weakness of will ought to admit that sometimes people can think that they are doing other than what they think is the best action open to them when in fact this best action is not in fact open to them. And he ought to admit that such a state of mind is still, on the face of it, mystifying – something that cries out for clarification. So, whether or not a person really can perform the action he thinks best, it sometimes seems to him that he is not doing what he thinks best. And do we not all find ourselves in this predicament, perhaps frequently? I shall later be asking whether the really paradoxical cases are as common as they seem to be; but how many people can honestly say that they do not know of at least prima facie examples in their own lives? Let me briefly compare the problem posed by weakness of will with that posed by self-deception. Both involve a certain self-alienation or self-estrangement: one is not fully at one with oneself. But philosophers speak of the paradoxes of self-deception, implying thereby that self-deception seems paradoxical whereas with weakness of will it is the denial of its possibility that has been labelled a paradox: the Socratic Paradox. This may be just an accident. After all, I have already characterised weakness of will, not its denial, as paradoxical. Yet it is perhaps significant and its significance may be this.21 To uncover self-deception in oneself or another usually requires some detective work and in the case of oneself may also be emotionally taxing. But when we are weak-willed we seem to be directly confronted with the fact: it seems to be a datum of experience. So, although weakness of will seems paradoxical enough, denying its possibility seems even more so.22 Belief and knowledge about what is best. Here is what Davidson says about the idea that the weak-willed person acts contrary to what he knows is best: It is often made a condition of an incontinent [weak-willed] action that it be performed despite the agent’s knowledge that another course of action is better. I count such actions incontinent, but the puzzle I shall discuss depends only on the attitude or belief of the agents, so it would restrict the field to no purpose to insist on knowledge. Knowledge also has an unneeded, and hence unwanted, flavour of the cognitive [more than a mere flavour, one might think]; my subject concerns evaluative judgements, whether these are analysed cognitively, prescriptively, or otherwise. So even the concept of belief is perhaps too special, and I shall speak of what the agent judges or holds.23 I am happy with this but I am not sure that everyone will be. I can imagine that some philosophers will say that if one is to have a case of weakness of will, the agent must think of what he judges best as objectively so. He might be wrong about what is best; his belief need not be knowledge but it must be thought by him to be knowledge or at least a strongly supported belief.24 If he does not think of what is best as in some way objective, then he does not think of it as independent of himself and it might look as though there is no distinction between what he does and what he judges best. Such philosophers are probably thinking of moral cases: the thought might be that one can 5 only act against what is morally required if one thinks of what is morally required as being independent of oneself, not something that it is up to one to decide. I shall not try to meet such philosophers on that particular ground, the ground of morality. Instead I shall argue that the are non-moral cases where it seems perfectly possible to go against one’s belief as to what is best, where one makes no claims whatsoever for objectivity on behalf of the belief.25 First, consider prudential cases. One can, it seems, believe that a certain risk is not worth running and yet knowingly run that very risk. This is indeed one of the prima facie cases of weakness of will where one is tempted to say, ‘That is weakness of will, if anything is’. Does the agent have to think that the risk is objectively not worth running for the sake of, say, immediate pleasure? Here I am not talking of the evidence for the dangers of overeating, overindulgence in alcohol, smoking or whatever, which may be as strong and convincing as you please. I am assuming that he accepts the evidence and asking, ‘Given that he realises the risk involved, judges it not worth taking, yet takes it, does he have to consider the not-worth-it judgment to be objective?’ I cannot see that he does. Nevertheless, I suspect there will be philosophers who think otherwise. They will say that, unless he believes that the danger to his health objectively outweighs the lure of immediate pleasure, he is not weak-willed in opting for pleasure. His judgment does not have to be correct, according to such philosophers, but he has to think of it as correct if his action is to be weak-willed. It cannot just be a preference that he admits is purely subjective. I do not know of any easy way to argue against philosophers who take such a view of prudential cases (though I am convinced they are wrong). What I think ought to settle the question of whether weakness of will requires a belief in the objectivity of what is best is a consideration of personal projects and ambitions. Is it not possible through weakness of will to fail to pursue these with all the vigour that one wishes? Could not a writer lie in bed on a cold, dark winter morning thinking how much better it would be to get up and continue work on the definitive novel of the Twenty-First Century? (Let us assume he is wide-awake and alert and his inertia is not just grogginess.) He surely does not have to believe that there is somehow a fact of the matter and that fact is that it would be best for him to get up. He does not have to think that doing so is somehow objectively obligatory or that it is his mission, assigned to him by God, the Moral Law or anything else external to him. He may think these things but he does not have to.26 No, he just thinks that it would be better to do something other than what he is now doing and that could be a purely personal, even idiosyncratic, judgment that he happily admits to be such.27 If we take seriously the fact that weakness of will is an internal state of conflict, it seems that we can bracket the problem of objectivity, as we did that of freewill. I suggest then that Davidson has given us an excellent characterisation of what a case of weakness of will is going to have to be like. And, paradox or no paradox, it looks as though cases of weakness of will are common. People frequently, it would appear, satisfy Davidson’s conditions, however this is to be explained. 6 I now want to consider certain features of weakness of will (or what it is going to have to be) that have not clearly emerged from the discussion so far. 3. Where Precisely Does the Problem Lie? I was half-inclined to entitle this section ‘What weakness of will is not’, but that would have been misleading or at least high-handed, since there are many kinds of behaviour that in ordinary language are often described as weak-willed or as instances of weakness that are not what philosophers have in mind with the term ‘weakness of will’: sensual self-indulgence, laziness, unsteadfastness, shyness, timidity, impulsiveness, pliability, indecisiveness and no doubt others.28 These are only candidates for being what philosophers call ‘weakness of will’ if the agent rejects or somehow disapproves of his own conduct and even then, if it is his own past conduct that he judges, there is no hint of paradox and no reason for the philosopher to be puzzled. (And one can say, ‘I have a weakness for X’ without the faintest hint of self-condemnation.) Weakness, it seems, is only of interest to philosophers29 if one has some reason to wonder, ‘Is this really possible and, if so, how?’ Yet there has been a tendency among philosophers, from Aristotle onwards, to describe kinds of behaviour that are obviously possible and to say, ‘Of course weakness of will is possible! Just look at these examples!’. This way of approaching the problem is perhaps best regarded as a way of tightening it up: Apart from these unproblematic cases, just what is possible when it comes to human weakness? Davidson makes a related point, though about a different set of examples: Perhaps it is evident that there is a considerable range of actions, similar to incontinent actions in one respect or another, where we may speak of selfdeception, insincerity, mauvaise foi, hypocrisy, unconscious desires, motives and intentions, and so on. There is in fact a very great temptation, in working on this subject, to play the amateur psychologist. We are dying to say: remember the enormous variety of ways a man can believe or hold something, or know it, or want something, or be afraid of it, or do it. We can act as if we knew something and yet profoundly doubt it; we can act at the limit of our capacity and at the same time stand off like an observer and say to ourselves, ‘What an odd thing to do’. We can desire things and tell ourselves we hate them. These half-states and contradictory states are common and full of interest to the philosopher. No doubt they can explain, or at least point to a way of describing without contradiction, many cases where we find ourselves talking of weakness of the will or of incontinence.30 He then suggests: But we ourselves show a certain weakness as philosophers if we do not go on to ask: does every case of incontinence involve one of the shadow-zones where we want both to apply, and to withhold, some mental predicate? Does it never happen that I have an unclouded, unwavering judgement that my action is not for the best, and yet where the action I do perform has no hint of compulsion or of the compulsive? There is no proving that such actions exist; but it seems to me absolutely certain that they do. And if this is so, no amount of attention to the subtle borderline bits of behaviour will resolve the central problem.31 7 Davidson is talking, not of the philosophically straightforward cases of weakness that I have just mentioned, but of the more subtle and less obvious case to which psychologists, psychotherapists and novelists draw our attention. And many of these raise ‘How could that be possible?’ questions in their own right. But he wants to know whether, these apart, there are cases where one clearly judges a contemplated action inferior to others that one equally clearly judges open to one and yet goes ahead and performs it. And he thinks the answer is Yes. So do I though, as I shall explain later, I have recently begun to waver. What would be an example of such an action? Shortly after the passage just quoted he writes: I have just relaxed in bed after a hard day when it occurs to me that I have not brushed my teeth. Concern for my health bids me rise and brush; sensual indulgence suggests I forget my teeth for once. I weigh the alternatives in the light of the reasons: on the one hand, my teeth are strong, and at my age decay is slow. It won’t matter much if I don’t brush them. On the other hand, if I get up, it will spoil my calm and may result in a bad night’s sleep. Everything considered I judge I would do better to stay in bed. Yet my feeling that I ought to brush my teeth is too strong for me: wearily I leave my bed and brush my teeth. My act is clearly intentional, although against my better judgement, and so incontinent.32 Davidson uses this example to show that a weak-willed action doesn’t have to be a case of yielding to the desire for bodily pleasures and comforts and may indeed go against it. Unfortunately, it sounds to me like an instance of compulsive behaviour; certainly one could not say of it that there is ‘no hint of compulsion or of the compulsive’. It may of course be out of character. He may not be given to ‘obsessive-compulsive’ behaviour; but it still seems like a one-off instance. We could alter the example and, instead of having him worrying about disturbing his calm and risking a bad night’s sleep by getting up, have him getting up to brush his teeth so he can forget the matter and go to sleep. But then one would wonder whether he was not acting in accordance with his better judgment. Davidson’s choice of example is probably just a slip and not much could be concluded from the difficulties encountered by a single case; but it does suggest that it might not be easy to describe – to construct – clear-cut and convincing examples of weakness of will, ones that obviously and undoubtedly satisfy all our conditions. Davidson believes that ‘we ourselves show a certain weakness as philosophers’ if we do not ask whether such clear-cut cases exist. And that is surely right – whatever the correct answer to the question might turn out to be. But I think that a further moral can be drawn from Davidson’s and our reflexions on ‘the subtle borderline bits of behaviour’. If someone is bent on explaining away apparent instances of weakness of will, as some philosophers surely are, he will often find himself appealing to mental states that are or ought to be just as puzzling. He may be led to say that someone can be wrong about what she values most or about her ability to perform some simple action, perhaps that she is self-deceived about these things. Error and irrationality and failure in self-knowledge are likely to make an appearance, even if we can avoid postulating weakness of will. The dispute about weakness of will no doubt leads us to investigate the limits of human rationality but it should not, as I sometimes think it might, be thought that one side is upholding the basic rationality of human beings and 8 the other side denying it. ‘No man knowingly (or willingly) does evil’ may sound like an affirmation of human rationality but the issue is too complex and ramifying to be regarded as the quest for some kind of verdict on whether we are basically reasonable creatures or not. On any showing, we are imperfectly rational. 4. Red Herrings. Pondering Davidson’s conditions for what philosophically interesting cases of will are going to have to be will help us avoid being side-tracked in various ways. We have already seen that the problem is separable from that of freewill and that a weak-willed act does not have to be against a judgment of what is best that the agent takes to be in any way objective. And in discussing this last point we have seen that the agent does not have to be acting against his moral convictions or his prudential concerns. Another confusion to be got out of the way is that the problem of weakness of will is a problem about ‘the real you’: Which represents ‘the real you’, what you do or what you think and say? It is, I believe, always a danger-signal when the maxim ‘Actions speak louder than words’ makes an appearance in discussions of this topic. Of course in daily life when this is said, the speaker is as likely to be thinking of conscious insincerity and hypocrisy as of weakness of will. But let us set this aside and assume that someone sincerely says that she regards some course of action, say going on a diet, as the best open to her, and yet either does not go on a diet and or does but soon abandons it. Someone concludes that her real self – the real she – does not believe that dieting is her best option. We show quite remarkable ‘weakness as philosophers’ if we take the problem to be that of whether her action or her words represent her real self. For we are in effect assuming that the hard problem of weakness of will has been solved. We are assuming that it is possible for there to be this clash between her sincere avowal of what she thinks and what she does. Perhaps it isn’t and what I have tried to describe is not really conceivable; but, even if it is, nothing has been done to explain how it is possible. The ‘real you’ problem is perhaps not entirely without interest. Suppose weakness of will is possible. Can one not then raise the ‘real you’ question? If someone goes against what she thinks best, then does what she does or what she thinks represent her real self? For what it is worth, I suggest that the answer is: Both.33 The fact that our unsuccessful dieter thinks it best to go on a diet seems as genuine a fact about her as the fact that she does not stick to it. She differs both from someone who does not think it best to go on a diet (and doesn’t) and from someone who thinks it best, goes on it and sticks to it. Another way in which the really hard problem posed by the notion of weakness of will can be missed is by contrasting what someone does ‘in the heat of the moment’ with what he thinks ‘in the cool hour’.34 Clearly these can fail to correspond and it is difficult to imagine why anyone should think otherwise. The hard problem concerns whether one can do something at a certain time and this be other than what one at that time thinks best. The contrast between ‘the heat of the moment’ and ‘the cool hour’ is also too restrictive, since it seems that, as well as ‘moments of weakness’, there can be weak-willed policies, extended periods of weakness, and one wants to know whether this is really so.35 9 Moreover, thinking in terms of the ‘heat of the moment’/‘cool hour’ contrast seems also to involve thinking in terms of ‘the real you’, since the assumption is that what you think when you have the time and leisure to reflect represents ‘the real you’, as against what one does when ‘in the thick of things’ when one perhaps does not have ‘time to think’. As a general assumption this seems dubious. Are there no cases where one criticises oneself for one’s lack of imagination in the cool hour, for a failure to envisage clearly enough what it would be like to be ‘in the thick of things’?36 One final red herring must be mentioned. Suppose one has described what looks like a clear case of weakness of will, one where one is inclined to say, ‘That is weakness of will if anything is!’. Davidson quotes the following from Dostoevsky: Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests …? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, knowingly, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path … compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing …?37 Some people will perhaps react to such behaviour with, ‘That’s just insane!’ And one can admit that it is irrational. We are after all concerned with a putative species of irrationality. Calling it insane does not make it impossible. Or, to put it the other way round, if it can be shown to be possible, this is what is of most concern to philosophy and the question whether it should be seen as a form of mental illness can perhaps be left to the psychiatrist. (If it is not possible, then that is one less thing for the psychiatrist to worry about.) 5. Radical Responses. Someone might take the line that the whole problem just shows up the inadequacies of ‘folk-psychology’.38 Perhaps one should not expect any satisfactory solution to it, since it is posed in terms of concepts that are destined to be swept away by the advance of science. This response will not give much comfort to those who, like myself, are puzzled and worried by what seem to be instances of weakness of will in their own lives. In any case, I am in many ways quite impressed by the versatility of the concepts of folk-psychology and would like to know how they fare in this instance. If they come unstuck, I would like to know how and why. I do not feel inclined to down tools and hand over to the scientist just yet. The possibility of another radical response occurs to me but I am not sure just how it would go. Colin McGinn has suggested that some, perhaps most, philosophical problems are a residual hard core of problems that the human intellect is ill-fitted, maybe totally unfitted, to handle.39 About one problem at least – that of the relation of consciousness to the physical – this suggestion seems to me to be very plausible. Someone might suggest that the problem of weakness of will is McGinnian in this way. Now it is an important part of McGinn’s argument that there might be beings whose intellects are able to handle problems that to us are utterly intractable (but perhaps unable to solve many of the problems – such as scientific ones – that human beings can solve). They have different ‘modules’ as he puts it.40 When I try to apply this idea to weakness of will I get into difficulties. Perhaps beings with deep insight into their own motivation and the concepts needed to describe it would simply not be 10 weak-willed. It could be – could it not? – that our liability to weakness of will and our difficulty in adequately conceptualising it are bound up with each other.41 6. Attempts To Solve The Problem. This paper will not propose any solution to or dissolution of the problem. Nevertheless, I need to say something, however brief, about Davidson’s own suggestion. I also want to discuss an approach that has attracted me in the past. Davidson’s solution42 seems to me to be a case of something very like ignoratio elenchi. He explains with some plausibility how something is possible, but that something is not weakness of will. It is a bizarre phenomenon, certainly, if indeed it ever occurs, but it does not seem to be logically impossible. It is this. Suppose someone weighs all the reasons for and against an action that occur to him and decides that in the light of these it is better on balance not to do it. This is a judgment based on all the reasons available to him. So it is in that sense a prima facie judgment, a judgment in the light of those reasons. According to Davidson, it is still possible for him to judge it better to do it – not prima facie better but better simpliciter, unconditionally, without qualification. If he acts on the latter, he is being weak-willed, for he is not doing what he thinks best on the basis of all the reasons he considers. There are two questions. Is this really possible and, if it is, is it weakness of will? I think it probably is possible. Consider this clichéd situation from a detective story. All the evidence seems to point to X’s guilt.43 But the master sleuth is not so sure. One thing, one very minor thing, does not fit. Or perhaps he cannot even point to anything as definite as that – he just has a hunch that the suspect is not guilty. So he forms a judgment about the suspect’s guilt that he is well aware is not supported by the evidence available to him and indeed goes against it. It seems to me that something similar is probably possible in respect of someone’s decision about what to do. It might occur if someone is on the brink of changing his moral allegiance: for example, someone who officially subscribes to utilitarianism but has inclinations towards deontological morality, or vice versa. Anyway, let us assume it is possible. Surely it is not weakness of will. The agent we are considering is acting in accordance with what he thinks best, even though it is not what he thinks best in the light of the reasons he considers. (One could say that he is acting on a practical hunch.) But the weak-willed person inwardly repudiates his action: it is not for the best simpliciter, not just not for the prima facie best.44 Where then should one look for a resolution of the problem? An approach that tempted me for a long time was Davidsonian to the extent that it focused on the agent’s judgment and asked about that. It seemed to me that the key to the problem would be an accurate characterisation of the judgment against which the person who is weak-willed acts. What is this ‘better judgment’? What is it to judge an action ‘best, all things considered’? I felt that, since the judgment and the action are what Hume might have called ‘separate existences’45, then there must at least be a logical possibility of their coming apart, failing to correspond. The occurrence of a certain judgment surely could not entail the performance of a certain action. If we had a 11 clear and distinct enough idea of what this better judgment consists in, I somewhat naïvely thought, the problem would pretty well solve itself. The difficulty was in providing an informative characterisation of ‘better judgment’. I could think of only two possibilities. The first (which really only applied to prudential cases) was that it was one that weighed the competing reasons without regard to temporal ordering. Many people must have reflected that they would not be much tempted to drink to excess if the hangover came before the pleasures of intoxication. The problem was that it seemed perfectly possible for someone to choose consciously and deliberately to live for the moment and to regard this as the best lifestyle, at least for himself. So he would experience the counsels of prudence as temptations and yielding to them as weakness.46 It now surprises me how long it took me to see this difficulty. Consider this case: someone says to herself, ‘I am going to regret this’. Does this ensure that her action is weak-willed? I cannot see that it does. The other possibility perhaps had a bit more going for it. I was impressed by Harry G. Frankfurt’s work on second-order desires.47 Without going into details – I am not sure how accurately I could reconstruct them now – I will simply say that my idea was that one could characterise a person’s better judgment in terms of the reasons she desires actually to move her to action (in terms of the kind of desire Frankfurt calls ‘a second-order volition’48). If she thinks it best, all things considered, to stop smoking, then she wants her reasons for not smoking, rather than those for smoking, to be the ones that move her to action. One problem with this was posed by the possibility of second-order conflict: suppose she also finds herself desiring that her reasons for smoking should be the ones that lead her to act.49 But I think that what weighed most with me was that this account seemed to get things back to front. Wouldn’t she – usually at any rate – decide that it was best all things considered to stop smoking and then on the basis of this form a second-order volition that her reasons against smoking should be the ones she acted upon? So I was unable to give any informative account of what it is to think an action best, all things considered. We all, I suppose, know what it is from personal experience, but what more can one say about it than ‘Well, it’s just thinking the reasons for the action, the pros, better than the reasons against, the cons’?50 If there is to be such a thing as weakness of will, then what one actually does can’t be the criterion of what one thinks best.51 But what then is this ‘thinking best’? The idea is beginning to look somewhat nebulous. I can imagine a tough-minded philosopher rejecting it as a kind of illusion: ‘To be sure, one has the experience of thinking that what one does is not for the best, but that experience, when you look at it, doesn’t amount to much’.52 This would be a rather more sophisticated version of the ‘Actions speak louder than words’ response. Or it might be a repudiation of folk-psychology. Or the two attitudes might be combined. 7. Is Weakness Of Will Really A Datum Of Immediate Experience? For a long time it seemed to me obvious that the apparently paradoxical cases of weakness of will are, not only possible, but actually occur; and, not only occur, but are common. And in the foregoing I have on the whole written as though what seem to be such cases are part of everyone’s experience. For years I would have said of 12 anyone who claimed never to have acted against his own better judgment that he was either lying or deceiving himself (as I would of someone who claimed never to have told a lie). Then I noticed that most of the cases of putative weakness of will in my own life – and there are plenty of them – involved an element of procrastination. I wasn’t, or wasn’t clearly, acting against what I thought to be best there and then. Let us reconsider our smoker. Suppose she thinks, ‘It would certainly be better if I were to give up smoking. But one more packet won’t make any difference. I’ll give up tomorrow’. And she buys another packet. If there is any paradox here, it is not that of weakness of will. We might think her self-deceived, but insofar as that is paradoxical, it embodies a different paradox. For the real paradox of weakness of will to get a grip one must think now that what one is now doing is not for the best. I don’t think Davidson would disagree but the point does not emerge very clearly from what he says. And of course one must believe some better course of action to be actually open to one or at least one must not believe that no such action is open to one. Are actions of that sort part of everyone’s experience? I suggest that the answer is less obvious than has been assumed so far. If we set aside the procrastination-cases as examples of behaviour that clearly occurs and that raises no ‘How could that even be possible?’ question, are we left with intractable cases of weakness of will of which the philosopher has still to give an account? When trying to disentangle the problem of weakness of will from that of the freedom of the will, I suggested that the one who performs a seemingly weak-willed action does not call her own bluff. She does not in general say, ‘I am not doing what I seem to think is best, and so it follows that either I don’t really think it is best or I am unable to do it’. I don’t say this never happens; and I don’t say that it never happens that someone draws the disjunctive conclusion and then opts for one of the disjuncts. It is surely possible to revise one’s view of what one thinks best or of the actions open to one. But it seems that it need not happen. One’s own current behaviour stares one in the face and yet one may feel under no compulsion to draw the disjunctive conclusion. Now as long as we have not ruled out the possibility of procrastination, there seems to be no paradox. Perhaps one thinks it best to do such-and-such in the not too distant future but does not think it best to do it now. Let us reconsider the case of someone lying in bed thinking how much better it would be if he were to get up and continue work on his pet project. It might be that he is just thinking, ‘I really ought to be getting up but a few minutes more in bed won’t make any difference’. No obvious paradox there; though if he continues to lie in for far more than ‘a few minutes’, repeatedly telling himself that a few minutes longer won’t make any difference, then we might have a case of self-deception on our hands with its paradoxes. Suppose he tells himself, ‘It would be best to get up now, this minute!’ but does not get up. Such cases seem to occur.53 Are they not clear-cut cases of weakness of will? Our lie-abed need not draw the disjunctive conclusion that either he is unable to bring himself to get up or he does not really think it best to get up now. (We are assuming, remember, that he is wide-awake, so that his failure to draw the disjunctive 13 conclusion cannot be ascribed to lack of mental alertness.) Nor can we draw that conclusion about him. We do not seem justified in concluding that either he can’t bring himself to get up or he does not really think it best to get up now. Yet at the same time we have not eliminated either of the disjuncts. Could it not be that he is unable to bring himself to get up?54 And could it not be that he does not really think it best to get up now? It does not seem to be obviously an a priori truth that a person always knows whether he is able to bring himself to perform some simple action like getting up out of bed. Nor does it seem to be obviously an a priori truth that a person always knows what he thinks best. Suppose we think of ourselves as having been trying to prove that weakness of will is logically possible. We have ended up with a case that is neither a complete failure nor totally satisfactory. It certainly looks like a case of weakness of will and, what is more, a perfectly familiar, everyday sort of case. But we haven’t definitively ruled out the possibility that it might be something else. And yet the possibilities we haven’t ruled out are themselves problematic: one wants to ask: How if at all are they possible? On balance the believer in weakness of will seems to have the upper hand. It certainly seems natural to describe the case using the language of weakness. If someone were to insist that it should not be so described – that one or other of the disjuncts must be true – this would look like apriorism. Yet, to repeat, the disjunction has not been ruled out. Imagine what a fairly moderate critic of folk-psychology might say: Our folk-psychological concepts serve us well enough in most situations of daily life. There is often no doubt about whether a particular concept applies in a particular case. But there are cases that show up the limitations of folkpsychology and this is one. If one wants to go further into what is really going on, one will probably need different concepts, no doubt including ones drawn from neurophysiology. As things are, the psychological concepts we employ in daily life do not really tell us what to say of a case like this. The natural way to describe it is probably in terms of weakness: the agent fails to do what he thinks best, even though he believes that course of action to be open to him. And perhaps the natural way should be given the benefit of the doubt. But we are not compelled to adopt it, so long as the disjuncts have not been ruled out. Perhaps the safest course is to admit that we do not really know what to say. Compare this with what Davidson says of cases that he regards as instances of weakness of will and ask yourself whether there is really so much difference between the two positions: We perceive a creature as rational in so far as we able to view his movements as part of a rational pattern comprising also thoughts, desires, emotions and volitions … Through faulty inference, incomplete evidence, lack of diligence, or flagging sympathy, we often enough fail to detect a pattern that is there. But in the case of incontinence, the attempt to read reason into behaviour is necessarily subject to a degree of frustration. What is special in incontinence is that the actor cannot understand himself: he recognizes, in his own intentional behaviour, something essentially surd.55 14 Surely this describes our lie-abed, even if one refrains from using the language of weakness. There is something surd about him lying there, believing he is able to get up now, and believing – or believing he believes – it best to get up now, yet not doing so. Of course, more cases need to be described and discussed. We need a phenomenology of weakness of will, or rather of the sorts of case we are inclined to describe as instances of weakness of will. Perhaps someone will succeed in describing an indisputable instance of it; or perhaps it will be shown beyond doubt that descriptions that appeal to weakness should always be replaced by ones that postulate inability to act or error about one’s own evaluations. At the present moment – and I have changed my mind more than once about this issue – I am sceptical about both these possibilities. Notes. 1. ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2, 1195. See also his The Consciousness Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford: O.U.P., 1996. 2. Part of what I am trying to do in this paper is to situate the problem of weakness of will in relation to two other philosophical problems, that of the freedom of the will and that of whether values are the sort of thing that can be objects of knowledge. In ‘How far can one get in explaining one’s own actions?’ (on academia.edu) I try to situate a further (in my view, neglected) problem in relation to all three problems. My ‘Peter Geach on nonsense, confusion and sin’ (on academia.edu) is also relevant. 3. In ‘How is weakness of the will possible?’ in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. 4. See his Freedom and Reason, Oxford: O.U.P., 1963, pp. 67-85, 90. 5. The two intuitively plausible principles are: P1: If an agent wants to do x more than he wants to do y and he believes himself free to do either x or y, then he will intentionally do x if he does either x or y intentionally. P2: If an agent judges that it would be better to do x than to do y, then he wants to do x more than he wants to do y. (Davidson, op. cit., p.23.) 6. ‘Virtually’ here is perhaps just an instance of philosophers’ fanatical caution. 7. Davidson, op. cit., p. 21. 8. Op. cit., p. 21. 9. Weakness of will brings conflict of motivation to the fore. It can often seem exaggerated to use the word ‘conflict’ to characterise every case where someone has a reason for doing something and a reason for not doing it (she might regard the issue as trivial or have no difficulty deciding what to do) but the cases philosophers discuss under the heading ‘weakness of will’ are not of this sort. 10. Davidson, op. cit., p. 21. 11. Op. cit., pp. 22, 23, 25. 12. The first clause of Davidson’s opening sentence – ‘An agent’s will is weak if he acts, and acts intentionally, counter to his own better judgment’ – would be open to this misunderstanding, were it not for the second comma. His formal characterisation is, ‘In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: (a) the agent does x intentionally; (b) the agent believes that there is an alternative action y open to him; 15 and (c) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x’ (op cit,, p. 22). 13. Op. cit., p. 22n.1. 14. Op. cit, p. 30. 15. I can’t find that Davidson says this explicitly but it seems implicit in his general approach to the problem. His remark about Aristotle that I mention in n.35 touches on the matter. 16. Davidson, op. cit., p. 42n.25. 17. In ‘Freedom to act’ in Davidson, op. cit, he writes (p. 63.) ‘Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, Stevenson, and a host of others have done what can be done, or ought ever to have been needed, to remove the confusions that can make determinism seem to frustrate freedom’. 18. I am not saying that this never happens, only that it needn’t. See Section 7. 19. The hard determinist who is inclined to judge himself weak-willed on some occasion may have problem here. Ought he not always to say, ‘If I don’t do it, I can’t do it’? Perhaps this is best seen as an illustration of how difficult it would be to be a consistent hard determinist, one who made no concessions whatsoever to compatibilism. 20. The early Sartre is perhaps an exception to this generalisation. 21. I think that David Pears makes this point somewhere but I have not been able to find it. 22. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1145 b 27-28, said bluntly that it contradicts the facts. 23. Davidson, op. cit., p. 21. 24. On this point it is difficult for modern philosophers to understand the mindset of Socrates and Plato, who seemed to think that knowledge has some special power to compel action that conviction, however strong, that falls short of being knowledge lacks. 25. Something to be thinking about. Suppose everyone, philosophers and nonphilosophers, were to become thoroughly convinced that all value-judgments were, without exception, completely subjective. Would weakness of will vanish from the face of the earth? 26. It is worth noting that the Harean surrogate for objectivity, universalisability (discussed in Hare, op. cit., and in The Language of Morals, Oxford: O.U.P., 1952), does not have to be applicable either. He does not have to subscribe to any general principle such as ‘Let everyone pursue his ambitions to the utmost’ or the Lawrencean ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’. 27. Of course, with some people a belief that a judgment of what is best has some kind of objective backing might as it were stiffen it up and make going against seem even more regrettable than it would have seemed otherwise. 28. Note too that being ‘strong-willed’ in ordinary usage covers much more than not being weak-willed in the philosophers’ sense. It is not even always complimentary: it can be a euphemism for pigheadedness. 29. As weakness of will anyway. Some of the non-paradoxical cases will be of concern to the moral philosopher. 30. Davidson, op. cit., p. 28. 31. Op. cit., pp. 28-29. 32. Op. cit., p. 30. 16 33. A stickler might prefer ‘Neither’ to ‘Both’, since ‘the real you’ implies uniqueness. Since this is not a paper about definite descriptions, I think we can relax a little in this regard. 34. The term ‘cool hour’ seems to have been introduced by Bishop Joseph Butler in his Fifteen Sermons, Sermon XI, par. 20. 35. Davidson, op. cit., p, 25, notes that Aristotle seems to have held that it is impossible to be habitually weak-willed. 36. In a subsequent ‘cool hour’ one may or may not return to the judgment one made in the earlier ‘cool hour’. 37. Davidson, op. cit., p. 29n.12. 38. The following will serve as an example of a forceful characterisation of the shortcomings of ‘folk-psychology’: So much of what is central and familiar to us remains a complete mystery from within folk psychology. We do not know what sleep is, or why we have to have it, despite spending a full third of our lives in that condition … We do not understand how learning transforms each of us from a gaping infant to a cunning adult, or how differences in intelligence are grounded. We have not the slightest idea how memory works, or how we manage to retrieve relevant bits of information instantly from the awesome mass we have stored. We do not know what mental illness is, nor how to cure it. (Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, revised edition, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 45-46.) 39. See his Problems in Philosophy - The Limits of Inquiry, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. 40. McGinn, op. cit., pp. 6-7, 18, 22, 25-26n.15. 41. McGinn (op. cit., pp. 1-8) calls his view (which he proposes only tentatively) ‘transcendental naturalism’ to emphasise that our abilities and inabilities are purely natural, as would be the supposed different abilities and inabilities of intelligent aliens. I can imagine a supernaturalist version of the view: someone might say that only God can understand human weakness of will. Peter Geach has a thesis of this sort about human sin in Providence and Evil, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1977, pp.63-66. I discuss his view in ‘Peter Geach on nonsense, confusion and sin’ on academia.edu. 42. Davidson, op. cit., pp. 40-41. My criticism is based on the work of Michael Bratman , ‘Practical reasoning and weakness of will’, Nous, Vol. 13, 1979, and Ismay Barwell and Kathleen Lennon, ‘The principle of sufficient reason’, Aristotelian Society Proceedings, Vol. 61, 1982/83. 43. Davidson (op. cit., p. 37) does in fact see an analogy between the problem of how to make decisions in the light of conflicting reasons and a problem about probabilistic reasoning to which Carl Hempel draws attention. 44. Consider also the kind of prudential case where someone is concerned exclusively with what is in his own best interests. He decides it is best, all things considered, to play safe but then throws caution to the winds (‘What the Hell!’). Insofar as this conforms to the pattern Davidson outlines, it doesn’t seem to be weakness of will, even if it exemplifies a kind of irrationality. 45. Par. 13 of the Appendix to Book I, Part 3, Section 14 of the Treatise. 46. See Joyce Trebilcot, ‘Aprudentialism’, American Philosophical Quarterly. Vol. 11, 1974. 47. See his ‘Freedom of the will and the concept of a person’ in The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1988. 48. Frankfurt, op. cit., p. 16. Frankfurt does not use this notion to shed light on weakness of will, though others have tried to do so. 17 49. Frankfurt explores this problem elsewhere in the book, particularly in the paper ‘Identification and externality’. 50. I am of course generalising from my own failure. Perhaps others will not dry up in the way I did. 51. I owe this way of putting the matter to Jim Grant. 52. A mere experience like the one Wittgenstein mentions at PI, I, 323 ‘in which light was always seeming to dawn on someone – he exclaims, “Now I have it!” and then can never justify himself in practice’. 53. In cases where the weakness of will reveals itself in inaction it is perhaps worth stating explicitly that I am assuming the person has the physical ability to act, that there is nothing wrong with his musculature. I shall therefore ask, not whether he is able to get up, but whether he is able to bring himself to get up. I might also note that one sometimes hears the phrase ‘paralysis of the will’ used to describe this kind of case. I do not find it helpful. 54. Someone might say, ‘He’d get up fast enough if he thought the house was on fire’. Yes, but that would be in a different situation. In any case, as I said, I am assuming he has the physical ability to get up but does not even try to do so. 55. Davidson, op. cit., p. 42.