I believe akrasia, weakness of will, is impossible. More precisely, I believe that no one knowingly does what is wrong. All evil actions are accidentally evil. This view fits nicely with my view that there is no free will, which also implies that all evil actions are accidentally evil. No one chooses the chisels that shape the marble block that is their character – chisels such as parents, genetics, social pressures, survival pressures, and so on. Those who have an evil character have one by happenstance. Those who make evil choices do so on the basis of the character they have by happenstance. All actions are accidents.
Here is an interesting rebuttal: Consider the case of self-deception. When someone deceives themselves, they know what's true but bury that knowledge because they lack the strength to accept the truth, or something like that.
I myself am guilty of self-deception. When I was getting my first college degree, I lied to myself that this is what I wanted. It wasn't. I felt pressured and felt like I had no other options. Had money been no object, I would have made radically different choices back then. Much, much better choices in terms of my well-being. I think this is true of virtually almost every person; survival pressures force us to choose against our nature. If your nature happens to conveniently line up with a lucrative field, then good for you.
Eventually it came to a head and I had to do the hard, painful thing and look within myself and admit that I had been lying to myself the whole time. I continued and finished the degree, but this time with a new sense of honesty: I am doing this not for its intrinsic reward, but for the benefits that will come later. While I knew it was tragic to major in something you hate purely for money, I hoped that the rewards would be worth it. They weren't, but that's another story.
So we might put it like this:
When you self-deceive, you know what's true but you bury the truth because, to put it simply, you can't handle the truth. There are obvious psychological stories we can tell to explain why a particular person cannot handle a particular truth, given enough information about that person. So we can imagine someone deceiving themselves into doing evil, and thus knowingly doing evil.
My response is that self-deception does not imply knowledge of what is true. Knowledge requires belief, and self-deception prevents belief in what is true. I failed to believe what was true about myself because of self-deception.
When someone can't handle the truth, they refuse to believe it, and make up whatever excuses needed to allow themselves to believe what they want. It's a mistake to attribute to this person a tiny spark of knowledge that they are burying; that spark isn't there. What might be there is a fear that they are wrong about something. But someone can worry that they are wrong without believing that they are. It's just a worry. Though, often, we aren't even honest about our worries, with some worries being much deeper than we let on.
Getting out of self-deception does not feel to me like the unburying of a known truth. Rather, it feels like the walls I had put up to protect myself have collapsed, and now I'm psychologically able to believe according to the evidence that had been there all along.
Counter argument: Deception is the act of deliberately causing someone to believe wrongly. In order to deceive, you must know what is right so that you can lead your target astray. So when you deceive yourself, there must be a part of you that knows what's right to lead the rest of yourself astray.
My response is that self-deception is not deception in the ordinary sense, but is a failure of self-honesty. The failure to be honest with oneself, much like the failure to be smart or brave, is not an intentional act but the result of the quality of one's character in that moment.
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