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Traditionally, weakness of the will has been characterized as a person choosing to act against his or her best judgment about what he or she should do. That is, one recognizes that it would be best to do one thing but chooses to do another instead. This choice is free and hence is not compelled; the agent could have done otherwise (Watson 114). Such a conception dates back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates famously denied that a person could knowingly fail to do what he or she believed was best “because he believed that human beings always most desire, and hence pursue, what is (thought to be) best” (Watson 114). One could interpret Plato’s later writings as suggesting that weakness of will occurs when the nonrational part of the soul overpowers the rational part of the soul and so “the desires of the nonrational soul may motivate the agent contrary to his or her ‘desires’ for the good” (Watson 115). Aristotle attempted to explain the phenomenon by suggesting that, while reflecting on knowledge, one could not act against it. However, such knowledge could be stored in one’s mind but not consciously reflected on at the moment of action. Hence, this knowledge would not be readily available to guide the agent and so the agent’s action would not consciously contradict this knowledge. Alternatively, such knowledge could be faked and hence not really known, like an actor reciting lines on a stage. Nevertheless, if one had full unqualified knowledge about how to act, one could not act against one’s best judgment.
While many contemporary philosophers have continued to explain, criticize, and defend weakness of will as understood along similar lines as proposed by the ancients, Richard Holton has recently offered a different conception of weakness of will. He believes that weakness of will is best characterized as being displayed in cases when a person fails to act on his or her intentions, though not in all such cases. For example, a person may choose to not act on an intention because the circumstances surrounding that intention have changed. Or perhaps that person has acquired new information that bears on the action or has reconsidered the information relevant to the situation and has rightly judged that one’s previous intentions were ill-considered (Holton, “Intention” 1). What is distinctive, then, in cases of weakness of will is that “agents are too ready to reconsider their intentions” when faced with a choice about an action (Holton, “Intention” 1). The agent’s intentions are not sufficiently resistant to being changed and hence these intentions of the agent’s will are weak. This paper will explain and critique this conception of weakness of will, but will ultimately find a revised version of it satisfactory in explaining what we intuitively take be instances of weakness of will. That is, weakness of will involves an agent freely choosing to act against her ongoing intentions that were formed on the basis of her best rational judgment so as to act in accordance with her more immediate desires.
An agent will quite often form an intention to perform a certain act in the future. This intention is a decision to act that is stored until the moment of action comes. If one does not revise one’s intention, then one will act on the basis of that stored decision. And since such intentions are generally not revised or reconsidered, they are thought to be fairly stable (Holton, “Intention” 3). For our purposes, such intention-forming abilities are useful because they allow us to make decisions about our future actions in circumstances that are more conducive to making a good decision. For example, suppose that I believe that I should act in a certain way in the future but I know that I will be tempted not to when the time arrives. “Then it would be useful to form an intention now, an intention that will lead me directly to act when the time comes, and that will be somewhat immune to reconsideration in the light of the desires I shall have then” (Holton, “Intention” 4). Thus, by forming a prior intention to act, one can overcome a present desire that may influence one’s decision to act in the moment. One has already made the decision and so the desire cannot enter into one’s deliberation about the act.
This is especially important in instances where one act will not lead to harm, but repeating the action over and over will. For example, one may eat a carton of ice cream one night. In itself, this action will not be very harmful to one’s health, although making a habit of eating a carton of ice cream every night would lead to serious health problems. However, every night a person could reason that it’s just one carton of ice cream and one carton of ice cream is not that unhealthy. In fact, if we just focus on eating this one carton of ice cream, then perhaps all things considered, it will be best to have this carton of ice cream (e.g., one experiences satisfaction, pleasure). But even if each individual instance by itself will produce the best outcome at the time, one will quickly experience very serious health problems if one only considers each instance in isolation. In order to counteract this way of reasoning, one needs “a general intention concerning a certain type of action; … a policy intention” (Holton, “Intention” 4). That is, one needs to form a general intention that rules out specific actions on the basis that repeating them will lead consequences that one wishes to avoid.
According to Holton, weakness of will occurs when one does not follow one’s prior intentions regarding specific acts or types of acts. Instead, one reconsiders or revises the previously made decision “in circumstances in which they should not have revised it” (Holton, “Intention” 5). This revision “exhibits tendencies that it is not reasonable for the agent to have” (Holton, “Intention” 6). That is, it conflicts with norms of reasoning. For example, it is generally reasonable to change one’s intention if the circumstances change, but not if the circumstances remain the same since one has already formed a decision to act on the basis of the same available information. In the case of weakness of will, one typically has formed an intention to act that one knows will be met with contrary desires at the moment of action. The intention is supposed to overcome these contrary desires by precluding them from the decision process. However, in the face of these contrary desires, one reconsiders and revises one’s decision, thereby accommodating the desires that were meant to be ignored and overcome.
As such, there are two components to Holton’s conception of weakness of will. First, the descriptive component requires that in order for an agent to display weakness of will, she must have first formed an intention to act that is then revised at the time of action. Second, the normative component requires that the revision should not have been done as measured “by the standards of a good intender” (Holton, “Intention” 13). Holton does not explicitly say what he means by “good intender”, but we may take him to mean that a person who follows through on her intentions in circumstances that society would approve of and who revises her intentions only when society would approve of such a revision would not make a revision in this case; this revision did not conform to norms of reasoning. This is in contrast to the traditional account in which there is only a descriptive component: the agent acts weakly when acting against her best judgment about an action.
This view, Holton believes, has several advantages over the traditional view in which weakness of will has to do with acting against one’s better judgment instead of too readily revising one’s intentions to act. I note two here. First, Holton points out that there are instances of weakness of will in which we do not act against our better judgment. There are situations in which we are faced with choosing from two actions that, though conflicting, are difficult or impossible to compare with each other and so neither is judged to be better than the other. For example, I may desire to study philosophy (requiring me to live far from home), but this conflicts with a desire to live close to my family. It is difficult to assess which of these actions is better as they take into account different values and considerations and so are not directly comparable. Nevertheless, if I were to choose one course of action but then fail to follow through, I would have acted weakly. So it is possible to display weakness of will even if one does not act against one’s best judgment.
Second, Holton’s account makes better sense of the social stigma attached to weakness of will. Holton notes that we do not regard people as weak willed in all cases when they act against their better judgment, but only when they have publicly declared their intention to do so and have failed. For example, suppose that a person sincerely judges that eating meat is wrong and that under no ordinary circumstances would it be permissible for her to eat meat. We wouldn’t yet say that this person was weak willed if she still chose to eat meat regularly. This person’s actions are inconsistent with rationality, but we would not say that she was weak willed (and hence deserving of “scorn”) unless she had formed and declared a sincere intention to not eat meat but yet did so anyways (Holton, “Intention” 10). In other words, an action is not weak in virtue of being contrary to a judgment, but in virtue of being contrary to an intention to act.
While displaying advantages over the traditional account, Holton’s view is open to criticism. In particular, there are three objections that require a revision of the view if it is to sufficiently avoid them. First, Holton’s account does not satisfactorily demarcate between instances of compulsion and instances of weakness of will. On the traditional account, “one displays weakness of will when one freely acts against one’s own best judgement; one is compelled when one’s action against one’s own best judgement is not free” (Holton, “Intention” 15). Freedom on this account seems to involve one’s having control over one’s actions. In contrast, Holton’s account makes no mention of control or freedom. This is a problem since a compulsive person can be understood as forming an intention that is always revised (involuntarily) at the moment of action, and hence compulsive acts would be classified as weak-willed.
In response, Holton first claims that it would not necessarily be bad to say compulsives were weak-willed, though it may be socially inappropriate to describe them as such (Holton, “Intention” 15). Gary Watson agrees with this first suggestion in characterizing weakness of will as a form of compulsion. He does not think that instances of weakness of will involve freedom because in these instances the agent lacks self-control, which is “the capacity to counteract recalcitrant motivation, that is, motivation which is contrary to one’s better judgment” (Watson 117). This recalcitrant motivation, Watson believes, is “alien” and contrary to the will of the weak individual, just as in cases of compulsion (Watson 119). So while weakness of will is an instance of compulsion, it is a special case of compulsion. We judge people to have weakness of will when “they give in to desires which the possession of the normal degree of self-control would enable them to resist” (Watson 122).
Given this, we can see that Watson, like Holton, takes weakness of will to be a normative concept. He goes so far as to say that whether a person displays weakness of will depends on what society she is in, making weakness of will relative to society. He claims that through socialization, we acquire the capacity to resist desires and to maintain self-control. In light of this, we hold each other responsible for maintaining a certain standard of conduct. A person displays weakness of will by falling short of these standards of self-control. On the other hand, a person displays compulsion when we recognize that they are being motivated by desires that would not be countered by having achieved a normal standard of self-control (Watson 123). That is, the compulsive agent experiences desires that “the normal capacities of resistance are or would be insufficient to enable the agent to resist” (Watson 122).
However, though the weakly-willed agent does not have self-control and is being compelled to act, we believe that the desires that motivate them are resistible because “had they developed and maintained certain normal capacities of self-control, they would have resisted them” (Watson 124). Weak-willed agents are thus like weight-lifters that have failed to train adequately in order to lift a normal amount of weight. Even though they cannot in fact lift the weight placed before them, we can still blame them for not having trained properly in order to do what is expected of them. Similarly, we can hold weak-willed agents responsible for their actions in virtue of the fact that they did not develop and maintain normal capacities of self-control; they are responsible in virtue of their negligence, even though at the time of action they cannot do otherwise.
But Watson’s account and Holton’s first response both seem wrong on several points. First, weakness of will is not an external relation compared to other members of society, but an internal relation with respect to oneself. On Watson’s account, a highly disciplined Buddhist monk will, having entered into our society, never display weakness of will. Any potential instance of weakness of will as judged by the standards of conduct of our society will be seen to be an instance of compulsion instead, for the monk has a degree of self-control far beyond what most members of our society have. However, the monk will know that he has displayed weakness of will in this case. It seems that he will not compare himself to others in his society, or even to other similar monks; he will assess his actions by what he believes he could have done, that is, by what he believes was in his power to do but yet failed to do. Consider also that it is possible for a person that was not raised in a society and who lived alone to display weakness of will. This hermit will simply fail to act on her intentions in this case and will judge herself without making any reference to societal norms. So it seems that we judge ourselves to have acted weakly when we have failed to act in accordance with a standard set by our own actions and judgments and not those of society. An account of weakness of will need not reference society in any way and so it must be an internal matter with respect to oneself.
Second, Watson’s account fails to recognize that, unlike instances of compulsion, the weakly willed person identifies with her action. She takes the motivation to act to be part of her and so does not view it as an alien or external force. For example, a drug addict suffering from a compulsion to take drugs will feel as though an external force is pressuring her to take drugs, whereas the recreational drug user that judges such drug use to be wrong will feel motivated internally to take drugs and will take this to be her own motivation. Thus, the weak agent identifies in some sense not only with her best judgment but also with the contrary motivation or will; she takes herself to be intentionally acting against her own judgment instead of being compelled or overwhelmed by some external force to do so. So it does not seem that weakness of will can be classified as an instance of compulsion.
Third, and related to the second criticism, weakly-willed actions are believed to be free and within the agent’s control. Agents take themselves to be acting freely when they display weakness of will, which explains why we reproach ourselves for failing to act according to our best judgment and original intention. Watson’s account counters many contemporary accounts in claiming that weakness of will does not involve a free act. For example, Davidson’s account of incontinent action requires that the agent believe that there is an alternative act open to the agent (Audi 175). Audi similarly claims that weakness of will is “criticizable” behavior, and can only be criticizable if one is not compelled to act (Audi 179). Thus, incontinent acts are not done under compulsion (Audi 180). Freely choosing to act and being in control of that action both seem to be essential features of an agent’s experience in instances of weakness of will. Given these considerations, it seems that we must disagree with Watson and take Holton’s second suggestion that the policy revision must be within the agent’s power in order for it to be evaluated with respect to reason. Since the compulsive’s policy revision happens outside of the agent’s control, it does not meet the normative requirement and hence is not an instance of weakness of will.
While having an adequate response to this first objection, Holton’s argument faces a more serious second objection that requires a revision of his account. The objection is that while his account seems to make sense of intentions concerning one-time acts, it has a hard time accounting for policy intentions. Holton considers the case in which we intend to get out of bed every morning at six, but remain in bed one day until nine. It seems that in such a case, I have not revised my intentions yet I have displayed weakness of will. Holton claims to the contrary that “I have revised the intention. I haven’t abandoned it altogether, but I have revised it. I have inserted a let-out clause: I intend to get up every day at six, except today” (Holton, “Intention” 14).
However, this response does not seem adequate. If we had revised our intention, then we should not feel as though we had failed in some way since we did not fail to act in accordance with our revised intention. But we do feel as though we have failed, suggesting that we have not revised our original intention. Instead, we have maintained that intention throughout; it is ongoing. Dodd similarly claims that “whether [an agent] really did cancel the old policy will be shown by how he acts and feels later. Subsequent guilt feelings, promises never to do that again, and the like are all signs that the policy was still in effect and broken” (Dodd 54). Holton’s suggestion makes it impossible to ever actually violate one’s intentions; what one does is what one completely intended to do thanks to a quick revision. Thus, one’s feelings of guilt must come from judging that one had unreasonably revised one’s intentions as judged by society’s standards of reasoning. However, this seems to amount to a denial of the commonsense understanding of weakness of will as involving a failure to act on one’s best judgment or to follow through on one’s intentions by acting in accordance with them. It also denies the commonsense understanding that guilt arises through a failure of some kind and not through an instance of unreasonableness or irrationality.
Dylan Dodd pursues this line of criticism. While largely agreeing with Holton’s account, he argues against Holton’s suggestion that weakness of will depends on what intentions one should have had when performing an action. He claims that “what policies one used to have isn’t what makes one’s current actions weak-willed. What matters is the policies one has now—the policies the agent has at the time (s)he performs the action” (Dodd 48). Holton’s account likens weakness of will to a last minute change in a law whereas Dodd believes that weakness of will is more like disobeying a law that is still in effect. He claims that “the policy the agent backs— legislates as a law for herself—will come into conflict with certain psychological states, moods, dispositions, and so forth, that the agent will continue to have at various times after she forms the policy” (Dodd 54). These contrary states will at times incline the agent to act contrary to her policy intentions, resulting in an instance of weakness of will.
This seems to make intuitive sense. In an instance of weakness of will, we want to say that the person had the correct will in intending a certain action (that is, a will that was in accordance with one’s best judgment), but that the will was not strong enough to achieve that intention. In contrast, Holton’s account suggests that instances involving a weak will are actually instances involving a wrong will: the agent revises an intention that she should not have. Notice that, for Holton, the weakness of will occurs prior to the action. It is the revision that is done weakly and deserving of scorn, not the actual action that follows from the revision. In contrast, for Dodd, the weakness of will occurs at the time of action. One maintains the same intention throughout, but fails to follow through on this intention when the moment to act comes. Audi shares this intuition, claiming that a condition on an incontinent action is that the agent has “not abandoned” a judgment that there is another action not chosen that would be better to do to than the action that is chosen (Audi 180). Dodd’s account, like the traditional account, rightly claims that an intention (or best judgment) is maintained throughout one’s engagement in the weak action, thus allowing for there to be a discrepancy between what one intends (or judges best) and what one does.
A third and related concern has to do with Holton’s normative component. We have already seen that it does not make sense to construe weakness of will as an external normative relation, but this is precisely what Holton’s account requires. According to Holton, whether a revision counts as an instance of weakness of will has to do with whether the revision “exhibits tendencies that it is not reasonable for the agent to have” (Holton, “Intention” 6). What is reasonable is judged “by the standards of a good intender” (Holton, “Intention” 13). Thus, an instance of weakness of will is determined by an external relation comparing one’s action to the action of an idealized “good intender” who acts in accordance with accepted norms of reasoning. But whether an action counts as being an instance of weakness of will does not involve an external relation to society, a “good intender”, or norms of reasoning. The agent knows when she has behaved weakly by looking to her own judgments and intentions, which have been violated by her action.
Dodd avoids this issue by developing an account in which weakness of will is purely descriptive. He writes that one forms a policy that, acting like a law, indicates how one ought to act. In an instance of weakness of will, “a disposition at a particular time leads one to violate a policy one continues to have at that time” (Dodd 58). This is a descriptive claim. One is not judged by standards of reasonableness in revising an intention nor regarded as not displaying norms of self-control. Instead, weakness of will is judged with respect to the agent alone concerning his or her intentions to act or refrain from acting in a certain way. Thus, it seems that weakness of will is a descriptive matter as the traditional account and Dodd’s account suggest it to be.
Finally, Holton does not explain the relationship between one’s best judgment and one’s intentions. This is not a direct objection to the account, but it is a desiderata of any account that proposes to offer a new account of weakness of will. In order to offer a satisfactory alternative to the traditional account, one must explain the nature of this relationship and how the alternative account can accommodate the intuition that weakness of will involves acting against one’s best judgment. I think the answer lies in the obvious fact that one’s intentions to act tend to be based on one’s best judgments. We generally reflect on circumstances surrounding a decision and then come to some sort of judgment about what our best course of action would be. We then (usually) form the intention to act in accordance with our best judgment and, barring instances of weakness of will, we act in accordance with our intention. Thus, when one does violate one’s intention, one (typically) will violate one’s best judgment. This idea is shared by Audi, who claims that two conditions of an incontinent action are that it is done “intentionally or knowingly” and with the understanding that “there is another action A', such that [the agent]… has judged, or makes or holds the judgment, that it would be better to do A'” (Audi 180).
Having considered Holton’s account, objections to it, and possible revisions, we can now say what weakness of will is: an agent acts with weakness of will when the agent freely chooses to act against her ongoing intention (and usually, as a consequence, her best judgment). But while this says what weakness of will is, this does not explain how it is possible. That is, what has yet to be explained is how or why an agent acts against her intention and thereby against her better judgment. For example, it certainly seems paradoxical to suggest that one can intend to act against one’s intentions, and so this must be more carefully explained.
This is the task that Sarah Buss takes up. First, Buss defends the claim that “no one can do something intentionally, if she believes that, all things considered, it would be better to do something else” (Buss 16). That is, an intentional action must follow from and be in conformity to what the agent believes to be, all things considered, the best action at the time of action. Buss believes this claim is supported by observing that no one can be forced to do something intentionally that she would rather not do (Buss 16). One may be compelled to act contrary to what one takes to be the best action, all things considered, but one would not be acting on one’s own intentions and thus acting intentionally, since one must identify with one’s intentions and compulsion is self-alienating.
Consequently, only an agent’s intentional actions can be considered to be her actions. Buss claims that “all of the movements of my will—for instance, my choices and decisions—are movements that I make. None is a mere impersonal occurrence, in which my will moves without my moving it” (Buss 17). For an action to count as her action it must spring from her; she must identify with the action by approving it and maintaining a sense of ownership over it. Thus, “a person relates to her own intentions as something she forms (and sustains) herself” (Buss 17). This is an important point because, as mentioned earlier, we are not alienated from the motivations and intentions that occur in weakness of will. If we were, then weakness of will would be a form of compulsion, which it is not. As Buss claims, “though someone may be helpless to resist her inclination to do X, this inclination is powerless to force her to intend to satisfy it, as long as she would really prefer not to” (Buss 18). However, contrary to an instance of compulsion, an instance of weakness of will does involve a preference to act against one’s best judgment, and hence, one intentionally acts against one’s intentions. The agent “endorses the very action of which she disapproves” (Buss 29).
How then does weakness of will occur, given that one can only intentionally act in accordance with one’s all-things-considered best judgment? This can be explained in the following way. Normally, we operate under the assumption that, all things considered, it is good to act rationally even in the face of contrary passions. But occasionally our more immediate passions are strong enough to make it extremely desirable for us to act contrary to what we rationally take to be the best action, all things considered (and contrary to whatever intentions have been formed on the basis of that judgment). However, in order for an action motivated by these passions to not count as an instance of compulsion, we have to adopt them as our own and so we must undermine the judgment that prevents us from doing so. To do so, we challenge the belief that it is desirable to act rationally in all circumstances. Having doubted the basis of rationality, we have given ourselves a reason to not trust the conclusions of reason. We are therefore free to embrace other desires and to act in accordance with them on the basis of a new all-things-considered best judgment that includes this reason to not trust reason (Buss 33). That is, we can choose to identify with our desires, and therefore act on them, while still recognizing that our best rational judgment recommends that we should do otherwise. Thus, one can still make a judgment that an action is best (and hence form an intention to act in accordance with this judgment), but then act against this judgment (and intention) by undermining rationality itself.
Acting in this way is irrational, and fits with our later assessment that what we did was irrational. But in another sense we do maintain our rationality because we are using our rationality to undermine itself. Buss characterizes this as “a typical piece of tortured rationalizing” (Buss 35). We attempt to maintain our conception of ourselves as behaving rationally while attempting to avoid the conclusions of our reason, and so we look for reasons to act in accordance with our desires as opposed to our best rational judgment. Finding such reasons, we can justify our actions and therefore come to identify with them (Buss 36). Thus, Buss understands weakness of will as involving “a conflict between [an agent’s] actual all-things considered evaluative judgment and the all-things-considered evaluative judgment she believes she would have reached if, when she acted, she had accepted the authority of her own reason” (Buss 36). This is the result of flawed reasoning that rationalizes in order to justify an action in conformity to one’s desires. In other words, an instance of weakness of will occurs when one intentionally acts in accordance with one’s new all-things-considered best judgment, which is formed on the basis of desires and a reason that undermines rationality, instead of acting on one’s ongoing intentions that were formed in accordance with one’s best rational judgment of how to act.
Buss’s account strikes me as correct, but it does require clarifying the proposed account of weakness of will in which an agent acts with weakness of will when the agent freely chooses to act against her continued intentions (and usually as a consequence, her best judgment). On Buss’s account, the agent has changed her final intentions by changing her all-things-considered best judgment, since at the moment of action she intends to act in accordance with this newly formed all-things-considered best judgment. However, the best rational judgment remains the same throughout, as does the recognition that one should act in accordance with the intention that was formed in accordance with it.
So we should say that weakness of will occurs when the agent freely chooses to act against her intentions that were formed on the basis of her best rational judgment (or formed on the basis of a rational judgment if there is no best alternative). In order to do so, the agent undermines the rationality of her judgment in order to come to a new all-things-considered “best” and “rational” judgment that accommodates the desires she wishes to identify with as her own. And as we would expect, once the desires have subsided and the agent recognizes that she has failed to act in accordance with the truly best rational judgment and the intentions formed in accordance with them, the agent feels guilt for doing so. That is, she recognizes that she has acted in accordance with her own weak will.
Works Cited and Consulted
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Buss, Sarah. “Weakness of Will.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78.1 (1997): 13-44. Wiley
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