Akrasia

Akrasia (/əˈkreɪziə/; Greek ἀκρασία, 'lacking command'), occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy, is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgment. The adjectival form is 'akratic'. Akrasia (/əˈkreɪziə/; Greek ἀκρασία, 'lacking command'), occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy, is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgment. The adjectival form is 'akratic'. The problem goes back at least as far as Plato. In Plato's Protagoras Socrates asks precisely how it is possible that, if one judges action A to be the best course of action, one would do anything other than A? In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming 'No one goes willingly toward the bad' (358d). If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal. An all-things-considered assessment of the situation will bring full knowledge of a decision's outcome and worth linked to well-developed principles of the good. A person, according to Socrates, never chooses to act poorly or against his better judgment; and, therefore, actions that go against what is best are simply a product of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good. Aristotle, on the other hand, took a more empirical approach to the question, acknowledging that we intuitively believe in akrasia. He distances himself from the Socratic position by locating the breakdown of reasoning in an agent’s opinion, not his appetition. Now, without recourse to appetitive desires, Aristotle reasons that akrasia occurs as a result of opinion. Opinion is formulated mentally in a way that may or may not imitate truth, while appetites are merely desires of the body. Thus, opinion is only incidentally aligned with or opposed to the good, making an akratic action the product of opinion instead of reason. For Aristotle, the antonym of akrasia is enkrateia, which means 'in power' (over oneself). The word akrasia occurs twice in the Koine Greek New Testament. In Matthew 23:25 Jesus uses it to describe hypocritical religious leaders, translated 'self-indulgence' in several translations, including the English Standard version. Paul the Apostle also gives the threat of temptation through akrasia as a reason for a husband and wife to not deprive each other of sex (1 Corinthians 7:5). In another passage (Rom. 7:15–25) Paul, without actually using the term akrasia, seems to reference the same psychological phenomenon in discussing the internal conflict between, on the one hand, 'the law of God,' which he equates with 'the law of my mind'; and 'another law in my members,' identified with 'the flesh, the law of sin.' 'For the good that I would do, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.' (v.19) In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, book II, Acrasia, the embodiment of intemperance dwelling in the 'Bower of Bliss', had the Circe-like capacity of transforming her lovers into monstrous animal shapes. Donald Davidson (1969–1980) attempted to solve the problem by first criticizing earlier thinkers who wanted to limit the scope of akrasia to agents who despite having reached a rational decision were somehow swerved off their 'desired' tracks. Indeed, Davidson expands akrasia to include any judgment that is reached but not fulfilled, whether it be as a result of an opinion, a real or imagined good, or a moral belief. 'he puzzle I shall discuss depends only on the attitude or belief of the agent…my subject concerns evaluative judgments, whether they are analyzed cognitively, prescriptively, or otherwise.' Thus, he expands akrasia to include cases in which the agent seeks to fulfill desires, for example, but ends up denying himself the pleasure he has deemed most choice-worthy. Davidson sees the problem as one of reconciling the following apparently inconsistent triad: