Results for '*Weakness of will'

946 found
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  1. Weakness of Will.Christine Tappolet - 2021 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. pp. 4412-21.
    One difficulty in understanding recent debates is that not only have many terms been used to refer to weakness of will – “akrasia” and “incontinence” have often been used as synonyms of “weakness of will” – but quite different phenomena have been discussed in the literature. This is why the present entry starts with taxonomic considerations. The second section turns to the question of whether it is possible to freely and intentionally act against one’s better judgment.
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  2. Attributability, weakness of will, and the importance of just having the capacity.Jada Twedt Strabbing - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):289-307.
    A common objection to particular views of attributability is that they fail to account for weakness of will. In this paper, I show that the problem of weakness of will is much deeper than has been recognized, extending to all views of attributability on offer because of the general form that these views take. The fundamental problem is this: current views claim that being attributionally responsible is a matter of exercising whatever capacity that they take to be relevant (...)
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  3. Weakness of will. The limitations of revealed preference theory.Aleksander Ostapiuk - 2022 - Acta Oeconomica 1 (72):1-23.
    The phenomenon of weakness of will – not doing what we perceive as the best action – is not recognized by neoclassical economics due to the axiomatic assumptions of the revealed preference theory (RPT) that people do what is best for them. However, present bias shows that people have different preferences over time. As they cannot be compared by the utility measurements, economists need to normatively decide between selves (short- versus long-term preferences). A problem is that neoclassical economists perceive (...)
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  4.  74
    Corporate Weakness of Will.Kenneth Silver - forthcoming - Journal of Business Ethics:1-17.
    Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. (...)
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  5. Weakness of will and divisions of the mind.Edmund Henden - 2004 - European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2):199–213.
    Some authors have argued that, in order to give an account of weakness of the will, we must assume that the mind is divisible into parts. This claim is often referred to as the partitioning claim. There appear to be two main arguments for this claim. While the first is conceptual and claims that the notion of divisibility is entailed by the notion of non-rational mental causation (which is held to be a necessary condition of weakness of the (...)), the second is explanatory and claims that the notion of divisibility is required for the causal explanation of weak-willed action. In this paper I want to argue that the partitioning claim remains unsupported, no matter how it is interpreted, and that weakness of the will can be made perfectly good sense of without the idea that the mind is divisible into parts. In fact, there are available various explanatory models each of which characterizes different psychological mechanisms that may be involved in weakness of will, none of which depends on any claims about mental division. I describe three familiar mechanisms and argue that weakness of will may occur as the result of any one of them. (shrink)
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  6. Non-psychological weakness of will: self-control, stereotypes, and consequences.Mathieu Doucet & John Turri - 2014 - Synthese 191 (16):3935-3954.
    Prior work on weakness of will has assumed that it is a thoroughly psychological phenomenon. At least, it has assumed that ordinary attributions of weakness of will are purely psychological attributions, keyed to the violation of practical commitments by the weak-willed agent. Debate has recently focused on which sort of practical commitment, intention or normative judgment, is more central to the ordinary concept of weakness of will. We report five experiments that significantly advance our understanding of weakness (...)
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  7. Weakness of will and motivational internalism.Voin Milevski - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2):44-57.
    The unconditional version of motivational internalism says that if an agent sincerely judges that to φ in circumstances C is the best option available to her, then, as a matter of conceptual necessity, she will be motivated to φ in C. This position faces a powerful counterargument according to which it is possible for various cases of practical irrationality to completely defeat an agent’s moral motivation while, at the same time, leaving her appreciation of her moral reasons intact. In (...)
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  8. Addiction and Weakness of Will.Lubomira Radoilska - 2013 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Mental conflict not always amounts to weakness of will. Irresistible motives not always speak of addiction. This book proposes an integrated account of what singles out these phenomena: addiction and weakness of will are both forms of secondary akrasia. By integrating these two phenomena into a classical conception of akrasia as poor resolution of an unnecessary conflict – valuing without intending while intending without valuing – the book makes an original contribution to central issues in moral psychology and (...)
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  9. Agency Implies Weakness of Will.J. Gregory Keller - 2008 - ProtoSociology 25:225-240.
    Notions of agency and of weakness of will clearly seem to be related to one another. This essay takes on a rather modest task in relation to current discussion of these topics; it seeks to establish the following claim: If A is a normal human agent, weakness of will is possible for A. The argument relies on demonstrating that certain necessary conditions for normal human agency are at least roughly equivalent to certain sufficient conditions for weakness of (...). The connection between agency and weakness of will is made through the use of an extended example that lays bare the links between the two. (shrink)
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  10. Rational Capacities, Resolve, and Weakness of Will.Daniel Cohen & Toby Handfield - 2010 - Mind 119 (476):907 - 932.
    In this paper we present an account of practical rationality and weakness of will in terms of rational capacities. We show how our account rectifies various shortcomings in Michael Smith's related theory. In particular, our account is capable of accommodating cases of weak-willed behaviour that are not `akratic', or otherwise contrary to the agent's better judgement. Our account differs from Smith's primarily by incorporating resolve: a third rational capacity for resolute maintenance of one's intentions. We discuss further two ways (...)
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  11.  98
    Précis zu: Weakness of Will and Delay Discounting.Nora Heinzelmann - 2024 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 78 (2):269-272.
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  12. Conflicting Judgments and Weakness of Will.Nora Heinzelmann - 2020 - Philosophia 1 (1):255-269.
    This paper shows that our popular account of weakness of will is inconsistent with dilemmas. In dilemmas, agents judge that they ought to do one thing, that they ought to do something else, and that they cannot do both. They must act against either of their two judgments. But such action is commonly understood as weakness of will. An agent is weak-willed in doing something if she judges that she ought to and could do something else instead. Thus, (...)
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  13. (1 other version)Akrasia and Ordinary Weakness of Will.Lubomira V. Radoilska - 2012 - Tópicos 43:25-50.
    In this article, I develop an Aristotelian account of akrasia as a primary failure of intentional agency in contrast to a phenomenon I refer to as ‘ordinary weakness of will’: I argue that ordinary weakness of will is best understood as a secondary failure of intentional agency, that to tackle akrasia.
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  14. What is the Difference between Weakness of Will and Compulsion?August Gorman - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):37-52.
    Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, (...)
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  15. Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will.Alejandro Rosas, Juan Pablo Bermúdez & Jesús Antonio Gutiérrez Cabrera - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (3):350–363.
    In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2x2x2 between–subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action valence (...)
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  16. What in the World is Weakness of Will?Joshua May & Richard Holton - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 157 (3):341–360.
    At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (2010) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, (...)
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  17. Where Does the Cetanic Break Take Place? Weakness of Will in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra.Stephen E. Harris - 2016 - Comparative Philosophy 7 (2).
    This article explores the role of weakness of will in the Indian Buddhist tradition, and in particular within Śāntideva’s Introduction to the Practice of Awakening. In agreement with Jay Garfield, I argue that there are important differences between Aristotle’s account of akrasia and Buddhist moral psychology. Nevertheless, taking a more expanded conception of weakness of will, as is frequently done in contemporary work, allows us to draw significant connections with the pluralistic account of psychological conflict found in Buddhist (...)
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  18. Weakness of Political Will.Camila Hernandez Flowerman - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 27 (1).
    In this paper I provide a preliminary account of weakness of political will (political akrasia). My aim is to use theories from the weakness of will literature as a guide to develop a model of the same phenomenon as it occurs in collective agents. Though the account will parallel the traditional view of weakness of will in individuals, weakness of political will is a distinctly political concept that will apply to group agents such as (...)
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  19. I knew I Shouldn’t Do It; But I Did It: Davidson on Causal Strength and Weakness of Will.Rafael Martins - 2019 - Investigação Filosófica 10 (2):05-20.
    Reasons for action is a widely employed methodology in practical philosophy, and especially in moral philosophy. Reasons are facts that explain and justify actions. But, conceptually, if reasons were causes, incontinent actions would be impossible. When an agent ranks an evaluation about what to do as his best judgement, it entails that he has a reason for acting as that judgement prescribes. But when an agent acts incontinently, he acts in accordance to an intention that is not aligned with his (...)
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  20. Embodied Akrasia: James on Motivation and Weakness of Will.Kyle Bromhall - 2018 - William James Studies 14 (1):26-53.
    This paper presents an account of akrasia, drawn from the work of William James, that sees akrasia as neither a rational failing (as with most philosophical accounts) nor a moral failing (as with early Christian accounts), but rather a necessary by-product of our status as biological beings. By examining James’s related accounts of motivation and action, I argue that akratic actions occur when an agent attempts to act against her settled habits, but fails to do so. This makes akrasia a (...)
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  21. Addiction, compulsion, and weakness of the will: A dual process perspective.Edmund Henden - 2016 - In Nick Heather & Gabriel Segal (eds.), Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the Relationship. Oxford University Press. pp. 116-132.
    How should addictive behavior be explained? In terms of neurobiological illness and compulsion, or as a choice made freely, even rationally, in the face of harmful social or psychological circumstances? Some of the disagreement between proponents of the prevailing medical models and choice models in the science of addiction centres on the notion of “loss of control” as a normative characterization of addiction. In this article I examine two of the standard interpretations of loss of control in addiction, one according (...)
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  22. Intentions, all-out evaluations and weakness of the will.Edmund Henden - 2004 - Erkenntnis 61 (1):53-74.
    The problem of weakness of the will is often thought to arise because of an assumption that freely, deliberately and intentionally doing something must correspond to the agent's positive evaluation of doing that thing. In contemporary philosophy, a very common response to the problem of weakness has been to adopt the view that free, deliberate action does not need to correspond to any positive evaluation at all. Much of the support for this view has come from the difficulties the (...)
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  23. Strong-willed Akrasia.Vida Yao - 2017 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 4. Oxford University Press. pp. 06-27.
    To act akratically is to act, knowingly, against what you judge is best for you to do, and it is traditionally assumed that to do this is to be weak-willed. Some have rejected this identification of akrasia and weakness of will, arguing that the latter is instead best understood as a matter of abandoning one's reasonable resolutions. This paper also rejects the identification of akrasia and weakness of will, but argues that this alternative conception is too broad, and (...)
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  24. Akrasia and the Problem of the Unity of Reason.Derek Baker - 2015 - Ratio 28 (1):65-80.
    Joseph Raz and Sergio Tenenbaum argue that the Guise of the Good thesis explains both the possibility of practical reason and its unity with theoretical reason, something Humean psychological theories may be unable to do. This paper will argue, however, that Raz and Tenenbaum face a dilemma: either the version of the Guise of the Good they offer is too strong to allow for weakness of will, or it will lose its theoretical advantage in preserving the unity (...)
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  25. On Becoming Fearful Quickly: A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's Somatic Model of Socratean Akrasia.Brian Lightbody - 2023 - Journal of Ancient Philosophy 17 (2):134-161.
    The Protagoras is the touchstone of Socrates’ moral intellectualist stance. The position in a nutshell stipulates that the proper reevaluation of a desire is enough to neutralize it.[1] The implication of this position is that akrasia or weakness of will is not the result of desire (or fear for that matter) overpowering reason but is due to ignorance. -/- Socrates’ eliminativist position on weakness of will, however, flies in the face of the common-sense experience regarding akratic action and (...)
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  26. Intransitive Preferences, Vagueness, and the Structure of Procrastination.Duncan MacIntosh - 2010 - In Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White (eds.), The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    Chrisoula Andreou says procrastination qua imprudent delay is modeled by Warren Quinn’s self-torturer, who supposedly has intransitive preferences that rank each indulgence in something that delays his global goals over working toward those goals and who finds it vague where best to stop indulging. His pair-wise choices to indulge result in his failing the goals, which he then regrets. This chapter argues, contra the money-pump argument, that it is not irrational to have or choose from intransitive preferences; so the agent’s (...)
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  27. Adversus Homo Economicus: Critique of Lester’s Account of Instrumental Rationality.Danny Frederick - manuscript
    In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate (...)
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  28. Descartes and the Danger of Irresolution.Shoshana Brassfield - 2013 - Essays in Philosophy 14 (2):162-178.
    Descartes's approach to practical judgments about what is beneficial or harmful, or what to pursue or avoid, is almost exactly the opposite of his approach to theoretical judgments about the true nature of things. Instead of the cautious skepticism for which Descartes is known, throughout his ethical writings he recommends developing the habit of making firm judgments and resolutely carrying them out, no matter how doubtful and uncertain they may be. Descartes, strikingly, takes irresolution to be the source of remorse (...)
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  29. Kantian Moral Psychology and Human Weakness.Jessica Tizzard - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (16):1-28.
    Immanuel Kant’s notion of weakness or frailty warrants more attention, for it reveals much about his theory of motivation and general metaphysics of mind. As the first and least severe of the three grades of evil, frailty captures those cases where an agent fails to act on their avowed recognition that the moral law is the only legitimate determining ground of the will. The possibility of such cases raises many important questions that have yet to be settled by interpreters. (...)
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  30. Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment.George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas & Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):96-125.
    Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these (...)
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  31. Might Desires Be Beliefs About Normative Reasons?Alex Gregory - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 201-217.
    This paper examines the view that desires are beliefs about normative reasons for action. It describes the view, and briefly sketches three arguments for it. But the focus of the paper is defending the view from objections. The paper argues that the view is consistent with the distinction between the direction of fit of beliefs and desires, that it is consistent with the existence of appetites such as hunger, that it can account for counterexamples that aim to show that beliefs (...)
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  32. Addictive actions.Edmund Henden - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (3):362-382.
    It is common to think of addiction as involving behavior which in some sense is ?out of control.? But does this mean addictive actions occur because of compulsion or because of ordinary weakness of will? Many philosophers argue that addictive actions occur because of weakness of will, since there is plenty of evidence suggesting that they are not caused by irresistible desires. In fact, addicts seem, in general, to perform these actions freely in the sense of having the (...)
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  33. Lessons from Akrasia in Substance Misuse: a Clinicophilosophical Discussion.L. Radoilska & K. D. Fletcher - 2016 - BJ Psych Advances 22 (4):234-241.
    This article explores the philosophical concept of akrasia, also known as weakness of will, and demonstrates its relevance to clinical practice. In particular, it challenges an implicit notion of control over one’s actions that might impede recovery from substance misuse. Reflecting on three fictional case vignettes, we show how philosophical work on akrasia helps avoid this potentially harmful notion of control by supporting a holistic engagement with people for whom substance misuse is a problem. We argue that such engagement (...)
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  34. Willing, Wanting, Waiting by Richard Holton. [REVIEW]Luca Ferrero - 2012 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (3):443-457.
    In his book Willing, Wanting, Waiting Holton defends a comprehensive view of the will. His central claims are: that we have a capacity of choice, independent of judgment about what is best to do, that resistance to temptation requires a special kind of intentions, resolutions, and the exercise of an executive capacity, willpower, there is a distinction between weakness of will and akrasia. I argue that Holton is right about these claims, but I raise a few concerns: I (...)
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  35. Quantum leaps in philosophy of mind.David Bourget - 2004 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (12):17--42.
    I discuss the quantum mechanical theory of consciousness and freewill offered by Stapp (1993, 1995, 2000, 2004). First I show that decoherence-based arguments do not work against this theory. Then discuss a number of problems with the theory: Stapp's separate accounts of consciousness and freewill are incompatible, the interpretations of QM they are tied to are questionable, the Zeno effect could not enable freewill as he suggests because weakness of will would then be ubiquitous, and the holism of measurement (...)
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  36. Spinoza on the problem of akrasia.Eugene Marshall - 2008 - European Journal of Philosophy 18 (1):41-59.
    : Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because (...)
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  37. The Nature of Temptation and its Role in the Development of Moral Virtue.Kevin Snider - 2021 - Dissertation, Middlesex University
    In the last 70 years there has been an explosion of philosophical and theological work on the nature of virtue and the process of virtue formation. Yet philosophers and theologians have paid little attention to the phenomenon of temptation and its role in developing virtue. Indeed, little analytic work has been done on the nature of temptation. This study aims to fill this gap in moral philosophy and theology by offering an analytic moral conception of temptation and explicating its connection (...)
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  38. The Beauty of Failure: Hamartia in Aristotle's Poetics.Hilde Vinje - 2021 - Classical Quarterly 71 (2):582-600.
    In Poetics 13, Aristotle claims that the protagonist in the most beautiful tragedies comes to ruin through some kind of ‘failure’—in Greek, hamartia. There has been notorious disagreement among scholars about the moral responsibility involved in hamartia. This article defends the old reading of hamartia as a character flaw, but with an important modification: rather than explaining the hero's weakness as general weakness of will (akrasia), it argues that the tragic hero is blinded by temper (thumos) or by a (...)
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  39. Socratic Appetites as Plotinian Reflectors: A New Interpretation of Plotinus’s Socratic Intellectualism.Brian Lightbody - 2020 - Journal of Ancient Philosophy 14 (1):91-115.
    Enneads I: 8.14 poses significant problems for scholars working in the Plotinian secondary literature. In that passage, Plotinus gives the impression that the body and not the soul is causally responsible for vice. The difficulty is that in many other sections of the same text, Plotinus makes it abundantly clear that the body, as matter, is a mere privation of being and therefore represents the lowest rung on the proverbial metaphysical ladder. A crucial aspect to Plotinus’s emanationism, however, is that (...)
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  40. Two Views of Animals in Environmental Ethics.Comstock Gary - 2016 - In Donald Borchert (ed.), Philosophy: Environmental Ethics. Gale. pp. 151-183.
    This chapter concerns the role accorded to animals in the theories of the English-speaking philosophers who created the field of environmental ethics in the latter half of the twentieth century. The value of animals differs widely depending upon whether one adopts some version of Holism (value resides in ecosystems) or some version of Animal Individualism (value resides in human and nonhuman animals). I examine this debate and, along the way, highlight better and worse ways to conduct ethical arguments. I explain (...)
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  41. Augustine on the dangers of friendship.Tamer Nawar - 2015 - Classical Quarterly 65 (2):836-851.
    The philosophers of antiquity had much to say about the place of friendship in the good life and its role in helping us live virtuously. Augustine is unusual in giving substantial attention to the dangers of friendship and its potential to serve as an obstacle (rather than an aid) to virtue. Despite the originality of Augustine’s thought on this topic, this area of his thinking has received little attention. This paper will show how Augustine, especially in the early books (...)
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  42. Irrationality and “Gut” Reasoning: Two Kinds of Truthiness.Amber L. Griffioen - 2007 - In Jason Holt (ed.), The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. Blackwell. pp. 309-325.
    There are at least three basic phenomena that philosophers traditionally classify as paradigm cases of irrationality. In the first two cases, wishful thinking and self-deception, a person wants something to be true and therefore ignores certain relevant facts about the situation, making it appear to herself that it is, in fact, true. The third case, weakness of will, involves a person undertaking a certain action, despite taking herself to have an all-things-considered better reason not to do so. While I (...)
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  43. (1 other version)Wanting what we don't want to want: Representing Addiction in Interoperable Bio-Ontologies.Janna Hastings, Nicolas Le Novère, Werner Ceusters, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith - 2012 - In Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Towards an Ontology of Mental Functioning (ICBO Workshop). CEUR. pp. 56-60.
    Ontologies are being developed throughout the biomedical sciences to address standardization, integration, classification and reasoning needs against the background of an increasingly data-driven research paradigm. In particular, ontologies facilitate the translation of basic research into benefits for the patient by making research results more discoverable and by facilitating knowledge transfer across disciplinary boundaries. Addressing and adequately treating mental illness is one of our most pressing public health challenges. Primary research across multiple disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, biology, neuroscience and pharmacology (...)
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  44. (2 other versions)Hope: A Solution to the Puzzle of Difficult Action.Catherine Rioux - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Pursuing difficult long-term goals typically involves encountering substantial evidence of possible future failure. If decisions to pursue such goals are serious only if one believes that one will act as one has decided, then some of our lives’ most important decisions seem to require belief against the evidence. This is the puzzle of difficult action, to which I offer a solution. I argue that serious decisions to φ do not have to give rise to a belief that one (...) φ, but can instead be accompanied by a hope to φ. Hope can motivate and rationalize the various actions that we associate with serious commitment. It can also account for the existence of special pressures to adopt an agential stance toward one’s future. Because hope can be cognitively rational when belief is not, there is no problematic tension between the ideal of epistemic rationality and the phenomenon of difficult action. (shrink)
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  45. Team Reasoning, Framing and Self-Control: An Aristotelian Account.Natalie Gold - 2013 - In Neil Levy (ed.), Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience. New York, US: Oup Usa.
    Decision theory explains weakness of will as the result of a conflict of incentives between different transient agents. In this framework, self-control can only be achieved by the I-now altering the incentives or choice-sets of future selves. There is no role for an extended agency over time. However, it is possible to extend game theory to allow multiple levels of agency. At the inter-personal level, theories of team reasoning allow teams to be agents, as well as individuals. I apply (...)
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  46. Adversus “Adversus Homo Economicus”: Critique of the “Critique of Lester’s Account of Instrumental Rationality”.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    This essay goes through Frederick 2015 (the critique) in some detail, responding to the various paraphrases and criticisms therein. It is argued that in each case the critique is mistaken about what Lester 2012 (Escape from Leviathan: EfL) says, or about what the critique presents as a sound criticism, or both. Introduction: the three problems with the critique and the philosophical problem that EfL is attempting to solve. “Abstract”: the critique’s confusion about EfL’s aprioristic theory of instrumental rationality. There are (...)
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  47. The Tripartite Theory of Motivation in Plato’s Republic.Rachel Singpurwalla - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (11):880-892.
    Many philosophers today approach important psychological phenomena, such as weakness of the will and moral motivation, using a broadly Humean distinction between beliefs, which aim to represent the world, and desires, which aim to change the world. On this picture, desires provide the ends or goals of action, while beliefs simply tell us how to achieve those ends. In the Republic, Socrates attempts to explain the phenomena using a different distinction: he argues that the human soul or psyche consists (...)
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  48. Iranian Muslim Reformists and Contemporary Ethics; Revival of “Utilitarianism".Hossein Dabbagh - 2017 - Insan and Toplum: The Journal of Humanity and Society 8 (2):19-32.
    This paper raises a moral issue for contemporary post-revolutionary Muslim intellectuals in Iran. According to traditional Islamic teachings, ethics enables people to transcend from this mundane world and offers guidance on ways to improve virtues. Most contemporary Iranian Muslim intellectuals have attempted to pave the way for accomplishing this goal. After clarifying the ways in which Iranian Muslim intellectuals have faith in virtue ethics as a best possible moral normative theory, we claim that virtue ethics fails to support some of (...)
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  49. Locke’s Diagnosis of Akrasia.Matthew A. Leisinger - 2020 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1):6.
    I argue for a new interpretation of Locke’s account of akrasia. On this interpretation, akrasia occurs on Locke’s account because certain cognitive biases endemic to the human mind dispose us to privilege present over future happiness. As a result, we end up irrationally pursuing present pleasure and the removal of present pain even as we simultaneously judge that doing so runs contrary to our own greater good. In this sense, I argue that Locke seeks to diagnose akrasia by identifying its (...)
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  50. Self-control as hybrid skill.Myrto Mylopoulos & Elisabeth Pacherie - 2020 - In Alfred Mele (ed.), Surrounding Self-Control. Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 81-100.
    One of the main obstacles to the realization of intentions for future actions and to the successful pursuit of long-term goals is lack of self-control. But, what does it mean to engage in self-controlled behaviour? On a motivational construal of self-control, self-control involves resisting our competing temptations, impulses, and urges in order to do what we deem to be best. The conflict we face is between our better judgments or intentions and “hot” motivational forces that drive or compel us to (...)
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