Abstract
This paper argues against the intuition that willpower and so called ‘tying to the mast’ strategies are fundamentally different types of mental actions to achieve self control. The argument for this surprising claim is that at least on the most plausible account of willpower (Holton’s mental muscle account) an act of willpower consists in an intentional mental action that disables the mental agent and thereby creates a mental tie. The paper then defends this claim against the objection that tying to the mast strategies do not have the same phenomenology as real willpower and that they do not preserve reason responsiveness.
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Notes
I.e., she is not free to do otherwise, even if she had desired to do otherwise.
Holton reserves the term akrasia for cases of acting against one’s best judgment. Holton does not deny that akrasia exists as well, but he does not think that these are the cases that are in ordinary usage described as typical weakness of the will situations. Strength of will, then, is the ability to resist unwanted judgment shifts.
The only possible struggle here could be between what the agent wants and a motivational force that she is alienated from, but weak-willed actions are supposed to be fully-fledged actions by the agent, rather than compulsions where the agent cannot stand up to an irresistible psychological force outside the agent.
Thanks to Mike Ridge for pointing this worry out to me.
For a very similar argument see Paglieri (2012).
Note that it will not do here to claim that the qualitative difference between tying to the mast cases and willpower-type cases is the difference between goings on inside or outside the head. The ties in distraction cases (TV, book, etc.) are very often outside the head, but seem to have exactly the same function as the rehearsal.
One might ask here whether there could not be cases where the agent is aware that his long term goal is worth more to him, but needs rehearsals to not be swept away by a brute motivational force that he does not agree with. One might think that in such cases rehearsal does contribute to deliberation. Cases like that do exist, but they are a) not cases of willpower on the Holton definition, because there is no judgment shift and b) even more importantly, even in these cases the rehearsal does not contribute to deliberation, but simply makes sure that the outcome of the deliberative process is what the agent will do. Thanks to Rob Rupert for raising this worry.
This leads to an empirical prediction against the Holton account. If Holton is right, then strategies like transforming the buffet into a puzzle should not deplete the mental muscle, as they are not real willpower. On my account, however, the prediction is that they will, because the effort is explained exclusively by maintaining the ties.
Thanks to Marcel Brass for raising this worry.
The same goes for a related distinction: It might be claimed that the real dividing line is between ties that disrupt deliberation (rehearsal and distraction) and ties that disrupt acting on the consequences of flawed deliberation (both Odysseus scenarios). Thanks to Rob Rupert for raising this issue. But even here, it is not clear that we can uphold the distinction. Distraction might normally occur during deliberation, but it is also works after a judgment shift has occurred.
The two systems approach is a very popular way in current psychology to divide the mind into two different systems. System one is characterized as a fast, parallel, unconscious and involuntary system, while system two is supposed to be slow, serial, conscious and voluntary. For an overview see e.g. Evans (2003). For a skeptical perspective see e.g. Keren and Schul (2009).
But from here, it looks as if a worry about Holton’s account could be constructed. Perhaps whether something is a struggle has less to do with the question of whether it is an intentional action, but whether it is system 1 or system 2 controlled. An argument like this has in fact been put forward by Neil Levy for cases of weakness of the will (2011). Levy argues that strength of will is not a specific faculty (as Holton would have it), but simply requires system 2 resources. Holton is aware of Levy (see page 134) and does not think that this is a problem for him. He is simply happy to accept that strength of will is probably a system 2 phenomenon, and doubts whether it is clear that Levy has a strong argument that it is not a specific faculty within this system.
Thanks to Robin Scaife for pointing out this worry.
There is a more interesting question lurking here though. If conscious deliberation in system 2 is effortful, then perhaps the question discussed here about the role of intentional actions for willpower is only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider question about the nature of practical rationality and the role of intentional action in it in general. I very much suspect that this is the case, but this clearly falls outside the scope of this paper.
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Vierkant, T. Is Willpower Just Another Way of Tying Oneself to the Mast?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 779–790 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0198-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0198-z