“Yeah, I grant that p and that q follows from p, so I really *want* to conclude that q, but I just don’t end up doing that!”
I actually don't find this implausible. I could imagine this being some people's reaction to the Repugnant Conclusion, for example ("I agree with every step of the argument, but I just don't believe the conclusion")
It's very important that I'm speaking of *logical* entailments. With the Repugnant conclusion, for the bad thing ("we should have a society with a ton of people whose lives are barely worth living) to *logically* follow, you need 3-4 premises: the 2-3 comparisons, plus the claim "you can repeat these steps ad infinitum." I imagine those who accept the comparisons as usually presented but deny the conclusion either (i) suspend judgment about *all* of the premises being true, even if they don't know which, or (ii) have not been convinced you can apply the steps ad infinitum.
The "ad infinitum" step I think makes these sorts of cases sorites-like, where people don't buy all the premises needed but they can't state at what step in particular it goes wrong (because there is no single step *in particular*). That seems different than when you just have two non-vaguely-true beliefs that are in blatant contradiction.
This is fair – I think often this is a large component of it. I just imagine that due to human fallibility there are likely a few cases where we intuitively struggle to combine several different statements (even if we were 100% convinced of each) into their logical conclusion. Some of these might be because the arguments are a bit too long/complicated to fully have each step in one's head simultaneously. But yeah I do think you're right that this is generally a bit different to what you were talking about. Regarding the vibe of "I wish I could convince/motivate myself to believe/do x", could there maybe be some similarity for certain mental illnesses, e.g. paranoia? I could imagine someone saying "Your argument makes perfect sense, and I wish I could just *believe* the conclusion that no-one is going to kill me, but my mind is just locked into that belief". Maybe that's just a case where they don't "fully" believe the steps, but could it also be that brains (and theirs in particular) can be bad at synthesising propositions together?
Ohhhh this is a very interesting one, as someone who also had to quit drinking while putting way too much thought into it.
I'm going to have to come back to this and chew on it. I resonated with Arendt's description of will as divided against itself on this topic - I'm also not really a big believer in *strength* of will, but it seems experientially wrong to me to say it's as simple as doing a thing reveals what one 'truly' wants - I don't think the experience would be as painful if both wants weren't genuine.
But then I also think I sorta believe that your description of akrasia-but-for-facts does happen lol.
>it turned out the “help” consisted in helping you convince yourself that your akratic actions are the best thing to do all along. The user gives great advice if your goal is to feel better about yourself, but bad advice if your goal is to do the right thing and live a good life. Maybe it’s even good advice if you want to be happy, but it’s bad advice if you want to be worthy of happiness.
Yes!! Love this. I'm so tired of "advice" like this!!
Really cool article, I love this topic! I’m not sure I’m convinced by your refutation of the evolutionary/animal inclination view. Firstly, I don’t think the temporal aspect is a good indicator of where one’s “animal interests” lie. I see the case you described as a conflict between two different animal drives that point in opposite directions. Fear is an animal drive regardless of whether it applies to a current situation or a situation 10 years in the future; it’s just that in most cases, that impulse will be less powerful when the threat is further away in time. Furthermore, certain stimuli will have a lead to stronger or weaker drives for evolutionary reasons; one might not be tempted to keep $3,000 if they risked a stabbing 10 years in the future, but a hungry person might be tempted to eat food that is right in front of them even if it came with with the same threat.
Are you familiar with Tamar Shapiro’s work on weakness of will? She was one of Korsgaard’s students, and I think she has a really persuasive account of what’s going on in akrasia. Her view is close to the “animal drives” view. Basically, the argument is that most of our inclinations come from our “inner animal,” but that in order to act on them, we usually have to formulate them into a maxim or principle of action. This is what it means for us to take ourselves to have reason to act. Akrasia, then, is a consequence of suspending the burden of formulating a maxim when under the influence of a strong enough inclination and letting our inner animal guide us instead. This results in actions that do not flow from reasons that I recognize, even if they are in a roundabout way caused by my will.
Yeah I've read Tamar's book! Super interesting stuff, I agreed with a lot of it (though I have since come to the conclusion that inclinations are directly voluntary--https://morallawwithin.substack.com/p/inclinations-are-voluntary?r=5zlcv8). I also worried that her ultimate account didn't really do the needed explanatory work (work which I now think can't be done because the thing to be explained is a priori false). The "inner animal" puts a name on the aspect of oneself which causes oneself to be tempted without necessitation, but it doesn't really explain how a will can be tempted without being necessitated. In particular, she uses the "burden" of freedom to explain why we succumb to inclination; but calling freedom a "burden" means nothing more than that it's painful to stick to one's maxim, i.e. that one has an inclination not to do so, which is the thing we wanted to explain the possibility of.
The important thing here is I'm talking only about instrumental rationality, i.e. how we weigh our various animal desires against each other to decide how to act in a way that makes us most happy, assuming all the relevant options are morally permissible. In this area, what we can explain without Reason is that inclinations weigh against each other and tempt us to do whatever we are most inclined to at the moment. Reason is required for calculating the weight of desires in a way automatic temptation is not responsive to, in particular, achieving the greatest good over one's whole life, even when long-term considerations are very remote and abstract. A non-rational animal might be able to take into account long-term interests through habituation, but we can do that from the mere theoretical judgment of what will happen in the future. So I think the case of foregoing money to avoid getting hurt in the far future--something that we can only do because we can form an abstract theoretical judgment about the future--is precisely analogous to foregoing drinking for long-term benefits. If there is any further disanalogy, I think I can modify the case and the argument would work just as well. (The hungry person might be tempted, but if they're *certain* of the future threat, I don't think they're going to get remotely close to actually choosing to eat, unless they are so starving that it might plausibly be worth it).
Regarding the second paragraph, in sum, as long as we stick to instrumental rationality, I think cases of supposed akrasia are precisely analogous to any case where we weigh one inclined interest with another that can only be apprehended by theoretical reason, and the only difference that I think makes supposed-akrasia special is that people have a narrative of themselves as being capable of simply not doing what they decide to do, making it impossible for them to revise their *actual* judgments about what to do through thinking about what to do.
I stopped drinking a month and a half ago, shortly before my 49th birthday, after decades of similar nightly drinking with similar short breaks to what you describe. It does feel quite "easy and free" now, without any substantial tangible pull to go back.
My process seems to have arisen from a sense of radical disunity of self. It was as if the members of parliament who wanted to get more useful things done, save more money (especially to donate), be healthier, and not participate in normalize something that utterly ruins so many other lives, politically figured out how to form a coalition, then how to have a few lunch meetings with other members in order to solidify their majority. I (we, the majority of sub-Js?) feel like I don't have any sort of moral right to greatly increase the probability of suffering and lost happiness for future self-slices, in exchange for comparably trivial present desires.
I'm much, much happier, in the same serene way that comes from not eating animals and from donating effective to those much worse off than my own parliament. It's also surprisingly easy to forgive the past time-slices.
I've also had success avoiding 'Akrasia' by reasoning through the correct thing to do, but while I don't know much philosophy, I think interpreting this depends on your definitions. For example, when I procrastinate, I often notice that there isn't a strong 'feeling' or 'emotion' compelling me to do so; instead, it just seems intuitively correct. In this case, reasoning through what I should do helps change my intuition, even if it is reasoning I would have explained if I had been asked before or during the procrastination, that, in some sense, I already 'believed'. I think this sort of 'belief' is what people mean when they say they believe whatever 'akrasia' makes them do is incorrect. I also think people do change their beliefs based on what intuitively feels right; that's what bias is! They just don't have a 'belief' to check their behaviour against, like they do with akrasia, because that is what is changed.
I'd emphasize an important aspect of weighing of desires/impulses (sometimes by desire you seem to mean net desire and sometimes you seem to admit there can be opposing tendencies that are desires) is that they vary with time. As the Almond Joy slogan teaches us "Sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don't."
I'd diagnosis my problems with keeping resolutions (going to bed at a reasonable hour for example) as in part a consistent failure to appreciate the variation and variation in strength of my impulses over time (my plan to get to bed was thwarted by failing to consider how compelled I would feel to respond to Florence's latest subtstack essay).
Akrasia as having a desire (as net desire) to do something and then not doing it, does seem impossible on the definition of desire as net desire. Although I guess if you are a libertarian (about determinism and moral responsibility and free will) then you believe people can do that. Likewise some fideists will believe x (some articles of religious faith) in spite of it being ridiculous up to contradiction. I definitely think libertarians and fideists are making fundamental mistakes.
I'm not tempted to think of examples of my expectations of the future as as high credence as you seem to use with your examples. I am reminded of the story of the man condemned to death who convinces the king to spare him by saying that he will teach a horse to whistle if spared for a year. The man explains "In a year a lot can happen: I may die, the horse may die, the king may die or the horse may learn to whistle." Perhaps I would rule out the horse learning to whistle but otherwise the reasoning/doubts are not nutty to me. Like the Earth will be in the same orbit in 10 years maybe, but if someone threatens to stab me in 10 years I'm going to have big questions about that. If for no other reason than I will tend to attribute dishonesty (or at least fail to attribute honesty) to people I judge capable of randomly stabbing people.
In my limited experience of people's description of addiction a common thread is hitting rock bottom and coming to recognize the consequences (pain, disaster, death) of not giving up the habit in question is often a necessary step in succeeding in quitting. Although you describe the mental state achieved with less gravitas I'm not sure its actually that different in terms of functional role. Without an appropriate grasping or grappling with the consequences of not quitting, sufficient commitment to actually quit is not formed and such a commitment is on most accounts necessary.
I’m reminded of Augustine’s concept of free will here, which is along the lines of “humans are free to do the thing they want most, but what they want most is never what is best for them.” His one way out of this hole is God’s grace iirc, which is not terribly reassuring to someone like me who does not believe in god. This more rationalist approach is interesting.
(Thankfully I’ve never been tempted by drinking to start with! I have an addictive personality in general.)
An important aspect of drinking to consider in reasoning with oneself about whether to stop, and more importantly, once having stopped for a time, is that each successive cessation of the habit makes the next one more difficult. It is almost always harder to quit each time you do, and at some point, if you keep on quitting and starting up again, it will eventually conquer you entirely. This is mostly physiological. Your body and mind will have progressively more intense negative reactions to the removal of the alcohol each time you remove it. In time, the physical reactions become deadly. If you’ve stopped, and haven’t put the idea of restarting out of your mind completely, this needs to be a factor in your thinking. It WILL be harder to quit, the next time you want to. This is why the majority of recovering alcoholics like myself know that we cannot ever willingly take another drink in safety.
If anyone wishes to speak confidentiality and personally about this, please reach out. I’m an atheist who drifts agnostic from time to time, so you can rest assured I won’t be trying to convert you into anything. I participate in AA, not because of faith, but because, for a still disappointing 2/3 of alcoholics, it can work, even if you are admitting to yourself that you are just faking it to make it. I’m not a doctor, so I’m merely offering a listening ear and personal experience. The decision as to whether one has a problem with alcohol can only be made by the person consuming it. No one else on earth can convince anyone that they have a problem with this substance. It always requires a personal surrender.
“Yeah, I grant that p and that q follows from p, so I really *want* to conclude that q, but I just don’t end up doing that!”
I actually don't find this implausible. I could imagine this being some people's reaction to the Repugnant Conclusion, for example ("I agree with every step of the argument, but I just don't believe the conclusion")
It's very important that I'm speaking of *logical* entailments. With the Repugnant conclusion, for the bad thing ("we should have a society with a ton of people whose lives are barely worth living) to *logically* follow, you need 3-4 premises: the 2-3 comparisons, plus the claim "you can repeat these steps ad infinitum." I imagine those who accept the comparisons as usually presented but deny the conclusion either (i) suspend judgment about *all* of the premises being true, even if they don't know which, or (ii) have not been convinced you can apply the steps ad infinitum.
The "ad infinitum" step I think makes these sorts of cases sorites-like, where people don't buy all the premises needed but they can't state at what step in particular it goes wrong (because there is no single step *in particular*). That seems different than when you just have two non-vaguely-true beliefs that are in blatant contradiction.
This is fair – I think often this is a large component of it. I just imagine that due to human fallibility there are likely a few cases where we intuitively struggle to combine several different statements (even if we were 100% convinced of each) into their logical conclusion. Some of these might be because the arguments are a bit too long/complicated to fully have each step in one's head simultaneously. But yeah I do think you're right that this is generally a bit different to what you were talking about. Regarding the vibe of "I wish I could convince/motivate myself to believe/do x", could there maybe be some similarity for certain mental illnesses, e.g. paranoia? I could imagine someone saying "Your argument makes perfect sense, and I wish I could just *believe* the conclusion that no-one is going to kill me, but my mind is just locked into that belief". Maybe that's just a case where they don't "fully" believe the steps, but could it also be that brains (and theirs in particular) can be bad at synthesising propositions together?
Ohhhh this is a very interesting one, as someone who also had to quit drinking while putting way too much thought into it.
I'm going to have to come back to this and chew on it. I resonated with Arendt's description of will as divided against itself on this topic - I'm also not really a big believer in *strength* of will, but it seems experientially wrong to me to say it's as simple as doing a thing reveals what one 'truly' wants - I don't think the experience would be as painful if both wants weren't genuine.
But then I also think I sorta believe that your description of akrasia-but-for-facts does happen lol.
But does it happen in cases of obvious *logical* inconsistencies?
Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and smash that subscribe button fam
>it turned out the “help” consisted in helping you convince yourself that your akratic actions are the best thing to do all along. The user gives great advice if your goal is to feel better about yourself, but bad advice if your goal is to do the right thing and live a good life. Maybe it’s even good advice if you want to be happy, but it’s bad advice if you want to be worthy of happiness.
Yes!! Love this. I'm so tired of "advice" like this!!
Really cool article, I love this topic! I’m not sure I’m convinced by your refutation of the evolutionary/animal inclination view. Firstly, I don’t think the temporal aspect is a good indicator of where one’s “animal interests” lie. I see the case you described as a conflict between two different animal drives that point in opposite directions. Fear is an animal drive regardless of whether it applies to a current situation or a situation 10 years in the future; it’s just that in most cases, that impulse will be less powerful when the threat is further away in time. Furthermore, certain stimuli will have a lead to stronger or weaker drives for evolutionary reasons; one might not be tempted to keep $3,000 if they risked a stabbing 10 years in the future, but a hungry person might be tempted to eat food that is right in front of them even if it came with with the same threat.
Are you familiar with Tamar Shapiro’s work on weakness of will? She was one of Korsgaard’s students, and I think she has a really persuasive account of what’s going on in akrasia. Her view is close to the “animal drives” view. Basically, the argument is that most of our inclinations come from our “inner animal,” but that in order to act on them, we usually have to formulate them into a maxim or principle of action. This is what it means for us to take ourselves to have reason to act. Akrasia, then, is a consequence of suspending the burden of formulating a maxim when under the influence of a strong enough inclination and letting our inner animal guide us instead. This results in actions that do not flow from reasons that I recognize, even if they are in a roundabout way caused by my will.
Yeah I've read Tamar's book! Super interesting stuff, I agreed with a lot of it (though I have since come to the conclusion that inclinations are directly voluntary--https://morallawwithin.substack.com/p/inclinations-are-voluntary?r=5zlcv8). I also worried that her ultimate account didn't really do the needed explanatory work (work which I now think can't be done because the thing to be explained is a priori false). The "inner animal" puts a name on the aspect of oneself which causes oneself to be tempted without necessitation, but it doesn't really explain how a will can be tempted without being necessitated. In particular, she uses the "burden" of freedom to explain why we succumb to inclination; but calling freedom a "burden" means nothing more than that it's painful to stick to one's maxim, i.e. that one has an inclination not to do so, which is the thing we wanted to explain the possibility of.
The important thing here is I'm talking only about instrumental rationality, i.e. how we weigh our various animal desires against each other to decide how to act in a way that makes us most happy, assuming all the relevant options are morally permissible. In this area, what we can explain without Reason is that inclinations weigh against each other and tempt us to do whatever we are most inclined to at the moment. Reason is required for calculating the weight of desires in a way automatic temptation is not responsive to, in particular, achieving the greatest good over one's whole life, even when long-term considerations are very remote and abstract. A non-rational animal might be able to take into account long-term interests through habituation, but we can do that from the mere theoretical judgment of what will happen in the future. So I think the case of foregoing money to avoid getting hurt in the far future--something that we can only do because we can form an abstract theoretical judgment about the future--is precisely analogous to foregoing drinking for long-term benefits. If there is any further disanalogy, I think I can modify the case and the argument would work just as well. (The hungry person might be tempted, but if they're *certain* of the future threat, I don't think they're going to get remotely close to actually choosing to eat, unless they are so starving that it might plausibly be worth it).
Regarding the second paragraph, in sum, as long as we stick to instrumental rationality, I think cases of supposed akrasia are precisely analogous to any case where we weigh one inclined interest with another that can only be apprehended by theoretical reason, and the only difference that I think makes supposed-akrasia special is that people have a narrative of themselves as being capable of simply not doing what they decide to do, making it impossible for them to revise their *actual* judgments about what to do through thinking about what to do.
The roooook!
He lives in my head and says "ohhhh nooooo....the board is a biiig place..."
Really amazing to see that my post was a small causal factor! I aspire to someday be an acausal factor.
I stopped drinking a month and a half ago, shortly before my 49th birthday, after decades of similar nightly drinking with similar short breaks to what you describe. It does feel quite "easy and free" now, without any substantial tangible pull to go back.
My process seems to have arisen from a sense of radical disunity of self. It was as if the members of parliament who wanted to get more useful things done, save more money (especially to donate), be healthier, and not participate in normalize something that utterly ruins so many other lives, politically figured out how to form a coalition, then how to have a few lunch meetings with other members in order to solidify their majority. I (we, the majority of sub-Js?) feel like I don't have any sort of moral right to greatly increase the probability of suffering and lost happiness for future self-slices, in exchange for comparably trivial present desires.
I'm much, much happier, in the same serene way that comes from not eating animals and from donating effective to those much worse off than my own parliament. It's also surprisingly easy to forgive the past time-slices.
I've also had success avoiding 'Akrasia' by reasoning through the correct thing to do, but while I don't know much philosophy, I think interpreting this depends on your definitions. For example, when I procrastinate, I often notice that there isn't a strong 'feeling' or 'emotion' compelling me to do so; instead, it just seems intuitively correct. In this case, reasoning through what I should do helps change my intuition, even if it is reasoning I would have explained if I had been asked before or during the procrastination, that, in some sense, I already 'believed'. I think this sort of 'belief' is what people mean when they say they believe whatever 'akrasia' makes them do is incorrect. I also think people do change their beliefs based on what intuitively feels right; that's what bias is! They just don't have a 'belief' to check their behaviour against, like they do with akrasia, because that is what is changed.
I'd emphasize an important aspect of weighing of desires/impulses (sometimes by desire you seem to mean net desire and sometimes you seem to admit there can be opposing tendencies that are desires) is that they vary with time. As the Almond Joy slogan teaches us "Sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don't."
I'd diagnosis my problems with keeping resolutions (going to bed at a reasonable hour for example) as in part a consistent failure to appreciate the variation and variation in strength of my impulses over time (my plan to get to bed was thwarted by failing to consider how compelled I would feel to respond to Florence's latest subtstack essay).
Akrasia as having a desire (as net desire) to do something and then not doing it, does seem impossible on the definition of desire as net desire. Although I guess if you are a libertarian (about determinism and moral responsibility and free will) then you believe people can do that. Likewise some fideists will believe x (some articles of religious faith) in spite of it being ridiculous up to contradiction. I definitely think libertarians and fideists are making fundamental mistakes.
I'm not tempted to think of examples of my expectations of the future as as high credence as you seem to use with your examples. I am reminded of the story of the man condemned to death who convinces the king to spare him by saying that he will teach a horse to whistle if spared for a year. The man explains "In a year a lot can happen: I may die, the horse may die, the king may die or the horse may learn to whistle." Perhaps I would rule out the horse learning to whistle but otherwise the reasoning/doubts are not nutty to me. Like the Earth will be in the same orbit in 10 years maybe, but if someone threatens to stab me in 10 years I'm going to have big questions about that. If for no other reason than I will tend to attribute dishonesty (or at least fail to attribute honesty) to people I judge capable of randomly stabbing people.
In my limited experience of people's description of addiction a common thread is hitting rock bottom and coming to recognize the consequences (pain, disaster, death) of not giving up the habit in question is often a necessary step in succeeding in quitting. Although you describe the mental state achieved with less gravitas I'm not sure its actually that different in terms of functional role. Without an appropriate grasping or grappling with the consequences of not quitting, sufficient commitment to actually quit is not formed and such a commitment is on most accounts necessary.
I’m reminded of Augustine’s concept of free will here, which is along the lines of “humans are free to do the thing they want most, but what they want most is never what is best for them.” His one way out of this hole is God’s grace iirc, which is not terribly reassuring to someone like me who does not believe in god. This more rationalist approach is interesting.
(Thankfully I’ve never been tempted by drinking to start with! I have an addictive personality in general.)
An important aspect of drinking to consider in reasoning with oneself about whether to stop, and more importantly, once having stopped for a time, is that each successive cessation of the habit makes the next one more difficult. It is almost always harder to quit each time you do, and at some point, if you keep on quitting and starting up again, it will eventually conquer you entirely. This is mostly physiological. Your body and mind will have progressively more intense negative reactions to the removal of the alcohol each time you remove it. In time, the physical reactions become deadly. If you’ve stopped, and haven’t put the idea of restarting out of your mind completely, this needs to be a factor in your thinking. It WILL be harder to quit, the next time you want to. This is why the majority of recovering alcoholics like myself know that we cannot ever willingly take another drink in safety.
If anyone wishes to speak confidentiality and personally about this, please reach out. I’m an atheist who drifts agnostic from time to time, so you can rest assured I won’t be trying to convert you into anything. I participate in AA, not because of faith, but because, for a still disappointing 2/3 of alcoholics, it can work, even if you are admitting to yourself that you are just faking it to make it. I’m not a doctor, so I’m merely offering a listening ear and personal experience. The decision as to whether one has a problem with alcohol can only be made by the person consuming it. No one else on earth can convince anyone that they have a problem with this substance. It always requires a personal surrender.