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2014), “Breakdown of Moral Judgment,” Forthcoming in Ethics, April 2014

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2014), “Breakdown of Moral Judgment,” Forthcoming in Ethics, April 2014 Mathieu Doucet University of Waterloo Mathieu Doucet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo. His research is in ethics, with an emphasis on moral psychology. His current research concentrates on weakness of will, hypocrisy, and the moral significance of self-knowledge. “Must We Regret Weakness of Will?” Commentator: Jesse Summers, Duke University Abstract: The two dominant models of weakness of will disagree about a great deal, including whether it involves the violation of a judgment or of an intention, whether or not weak-willed agents act contrary to an intention or a judgment they hold at the time of action, and whether it has a normative component. In this paper, I argue that a) despite these disagreements, both models are united by the assumption (either implicit or explicit) that regret is a typical or even necessary element of standard cases of weakness of will, and that b) this assumption is mistaken. I draw on empirical and philosophical work on self-assessment to show that regret need not accompany typical weak-willed behaviour. I then conclude by arguing that abandoning the regret condition forces us to revise our understanding of the nature of weakness of will. 1. Introduction Those of us who suffer from weakness of will often regret doing so. Consider an example: I resolve not to drink at the department Christmas party. Once at the party, though, my colleague breaks out a new bottle of Laphroig, and I find myself indulging despite my earlier resolution. The next morning, head pounding, I reproach myself for weakly giving in to temptation and breaking my resolution. This is an example that any philosophical model of weakness of will should treat as a paradigm case, and one reason for this that my regret seems to be evidence that abandoning my resolution was a weak-willed. My action seems weak not just because I do what I earlier resolved not to do, but because I myself realize that doing so was a mistake, and reproach myself for my own failure. In this paper, I argue for three main conclusions. First, I show that several otherwise divergent accounts of weakness give regret a central role. Second, I draw on psychological research on self-assessment to argue that this is a mistake, and that regret actually plays a much less of a role in weakness of will than is typically assumed. Finally, I argue that combining these two claims forces us to reconsider the dominant account of weakness of will, and to give a different explanation of what makes weakness of will (typically) irrational. 2. Regret Regret is an emotion that arises in many contexts, not all of them relating to weakness of will. The form of regret connected to weakness of will has several characteristics. First, if I regret my drinking the whisky, then at minimum, I judge I did something I ought not to have done. Second, 7 I judge that it would have been better for me not to have done it.1 Third, my regret involves a particular self-assessment: I judge that the cause of my doing something I ought not to have done is weakness of will.2 I can regret doing something wrong as a result of ignorance, or malice, and this will involve a different judgment than that involved in regretting weakness of will. Finally, this judgment will constitute (or be accompanied by) a negative emotional reaction. Regret is not just a judgment about the causes of my action, it is also a form of self-reproach: a self-directed reactive attitude. This means that, if it is true that weak-willed agents typically experience regret, then this will be because (1) weak-willed agents typically engage in retrospective self-assessment, and (2) when they do, they typically form accurate judgments. Below, I argue that both of these are false. First, however, I show that several leading models of weakness of will are committed to the idea that they are true. 3. Models of weakness of will 3.1 Akrasia: It is helpful to divide philosophical models of weakness of will into to broad categories. The long dominant model describes it as intentional action contrary to the agent’s considered or ‘best’ judgment.3 Common to the various versions of this akratic model is that those who act akratically act contrary to the judgment they hold at the time about what they have most reason to do. Weakness of will is puzzling, on this view, because it makes us act irrationally by our own lights at the very time of action. This view of the nature of weakness of will means that weak-willed agents tend to have a kind of self-knowledge: because they act contrary to what they still consciously judge to be best, they know they are weak-willed.4 This makes regret seems almost inevitable, and is what leads Aristotle to distinguish akratic from intemperate agents on the grounds that only akratics are “prone to regret”.5 3.2 Judgment-shift: Recently, some philosophers have argued that weak-willed agents do not typically act contrary to their own considered judgments—that is, they don’t tend to judge, at the time of action, that they are failing to do what they have most reason to do. Instead, a much more common form of weakness of will involves an over-ready revision of our judgments about what we have most reason to do. Such philosophers offer otherwise very different models of weakness 1 This second condition is necessary because it will be false in cases of tragic dilemmas, where the kind of regret present is quite different. 2 . This need not mean that I employ the concept ‘weakness of will’, or have a particular philosophical model in mind. It simply means that I believe that I succumbed to temptation or violated my own prior commitment. 3 The first version of this model is Aristotle’s, particularly in Nicomachean Ethics Bk. VII. It was revived by Donald Davidson’s “How is weakness of the will possible?” in Joel Feinberg, Moral Concepts (Oxford University Press, 1970). Perhaps it most prominent contemporary defender is Alfred Mele, in, for example, Irrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987) and “Weakness of will and akrasia”, Philosophical Studies 150 (2010), pp. 394-404. 4 Dylan Dodd’s account of akrasia does not require the violation of a consciously entertained commitment, so long as the action violates a policy the agent “continues to have at the time (s)he performs the action.” For Dodd, however, whether a policy remains in place is revealed by future regret. “ Weakness of Will as Intention Violation”, European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2007) pp. 45-59 at 48. 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1150b30. 8 of will, but they are unified in seeing it, not as action contrary to one’s best judgment, but as action brought about by a weak or irrational shift in judgment.6 The clearest cases of this form of weakness of will involve what Richard Holton, following Michael Bratman, calls “resolutions”: intentions “designed to stand firm in the face of contrary inclinations.”7 To return to the whisky: perhaps the morning of party I decided not to drink. In the morning I generally have no strong desire for Islay whisky, but I have enough self- knowledge to realize that in the evening, at parties, I often do have such a desire. I therefore resolved not to drink: I committed to not reconsidering or revising my intention, even in the face of future temptation. If, at the party, I reconsider and succumb to temptation, then I have reopened an issue I had already decided was closed, and treated my desire to drink Laphroig as a reason to drink it, even though I had previously resolved to ignore such desires. So on this model if, under the sway of Laphroig’s peaty aroma I change my mind and take a drink, I am weak- willed. This is so even if I deliberate prior to drinking and offer a rationalizing justification—I might say “I didn’t know there’d be a bottle of the 18-year-old! And just one dram won’t hurt. I was too pessimistic this morning”. Offering such a justification at the time of action need not, on the judgment-shift view, rescue me from weakness of will. An important difference between the two models is therefore that, unlike the akratic model, the judgment shift model involves no internal inconsistency, at the time of action, between what I do and what I judge I have most reason to do. Instead, my will is weak because I have too-readily changed my judgment. Moreover, since there is no internal inconsistency, I cannot be aware of it, and so do not have any self-knowledge of my own weakness. Because this model does not identify weakness of will with internal inconsistency, it faces a challenge that the akratic model does not: how can we distinguish between weak-willed intention-revision and perfectly rational changes of mind? Intentions are supposed to be stable and put and end to deliberation,8 but they are also supposed to be defeasible—changing one’s mind is not always a sign of irrationality. Sometimes, we really ought to reconsider and revise our intentions, even if they were rational at the time that we formed them. While different judgment shit models explain this distinction is different ways, regret plays an important role in many of them. 4. Judgment-shift and regret I suggested above that regret seems to be almost a defining feature of the akratic model.
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