Rorty on akratic breaksJay Carlson

“I couldn’t help it. She knew my one weakness: that I’m weak!” Homer Simpson

Rorty thinks the standard translation of akrasia—“weakness of will”—only covers a narrow subset of instances of akrasia.

I. Steps from beliefs to action.

1. General beliefs about what is ultimately good (e.g. conducive to human flourishing).2. Commitment to be guided by those general beliefs.3. Interpretation of a particular situation. 4. Formation of intention/ resolution/decision to act in a particular way.5. Action according to content of 4.

Usually we locate akrasia between 4-5, a disconnection between an agent’s intentions and her acts. But akratic breaks can also arise prior to intention formation, potentially explaining why akrasia manifests itself in steps 1-5. Rorty: specifying the exact location of the akratic break can possibly help understand the akrate’s condition and hopefully delineate how the agent might act—in a very broad sense—to mitigate her akratic condition.

II. Kinds of akrasia

A. Akrasia between 1-2 (Aim-akrasia): person fails to commit to what she judges to be best. -Cynicism about one’s ability to realize what one takes to be the highest good.-Refusal to commit to what one concedes is the ultimate good (e.g. Huck Finn)

B. Akrasia between 2-3 (Interpretation-akrasia): agent’s perception/interpretation of a situation fails to follow what her general beliefs or values would prescribe.

1. Mazarin Banaji: as a full gender egalitarian, she believes women are just as likely to be leaders as men. Nevertheless, when given an implicit bias test, she associates male names with leadership more readily than female names.

2. Tamar Gendler: people have behavioral response-patterns (aliefs) that the glass-floored Grand Canyon Skywalk isn’t safe to walk out on, even though they know that it is safe.

3. Why does interpretive-akrasia happen? Generally speaking, we selectively scan our environment for patterns of salient features. When an agent’s scanning picks out salient features that she explicitly rejects as racist, sexist, etc. she is undergoing akratic scanning (Rorty 338-9).

i. Solution for akratic scanning/interpretive akrasia? Habituated interpretive redescription:

1. Dieters interpret, e.g. a Snickers bar not as a bar of chocolately goodness, but as an hour on the treadmill.

2. Removal of sexist, racist vocabulary that perpetuates the treatment of certain features (e.g. a woman’s physical appearance) as salient in

Rorty on akratic breaksJay Carlson

contexts where they aren’t (e.g. Obama’s comment on Kamala Harris).

4. The import of habituated redescription seems to be that agents are capable of changing their interpretation of objects: “we have some leeway in changing [attitudes] that are less voluntary by changing those that are more voluntary” (Rorty 341). How strongly should we take this claim to be? Can an agent change their phantasiai simply by an act of volitional redescription? Is this claim plausible?

C. Akrasia between 3-4 (irrationality-akrasia): agent draws an inappropriate conclusion (intention/decision) given his commitments and interpretation of his situation (1-3).

1. Usually in cases of irrationality-akrasia we assume that there must be some missing premise—possibly from a suppressed desire (Rorty 342)—or that the commitments and interpretations as given are either false or misdescribed.

2. Rorty: irrationality-akrasia hard to attribute because intentions are identified by behavioral action or by the practical reasoning from which the action follows.

D. Akrasia between 4-5 (character-akrasia): person intends to do act φ but actually does some other act Ψ instead.

1. The description of this kind of akrasia as a flaw of character is misleading: a person’s character certainly includes how they think and reason about their own actions and attitudes, which Rorty grants (Rorty 344).Suggested alternative: behavioral-akrasia.

III. How does this analysis connect to Aristotle?

A. Centrality of habit to moral behavior (NE II.1 1103b15-20) extends to even our pre-intentional dispositions. Gendler: “all depictive representations—even those that we explicitly disavow as false—feed into our behavioral repertoires, it is only through a process of…habit-governed inhibition that representations whose accuracy we endorse come to play a distinctive role in governing our actions” (Gendler 660-661).

B. Rorty: for Aristotle “one of the conditions for akrasia is that the agent be capable of recognizing that he has violated his preferences” (Rorty 345). If the agent were incapable of recognizing his violations, then the act is no longer voluntary.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó (2008). Alief and Belief. Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):634-663.

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg (1980). Where does the akratic break take place? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (4):333 – 346.