Abstract
Can akrasia be rational? Can it be rational to resist the motivational force of your own practical judgment? While I do not believe that akrasia can be rational, I think there is something revealingly right in recent arguments for the proposition. I aim to defend that insight in a way that does not entail that akrasia can be rational but more fundamentally addresses the normative structure of rational requirements. The fundamental issue lies in the relationship between two conceptions of rationality. Previous treatments of ‘rational’ akrasia have tended to regard rationality as a responsiveness to reasons. Previous treatments of rational requirements have tended to regard rationality as an attitudinal coherence. I’ll reformulate the question of rational akrasia within a framework that construes rationality as coherence. And I’ll reformulate the question of rational coherence to admit the possibility of reasoning as the apparently rational akratic does—from failure to follow through on a judgment to abandonment of that judgment. I’ll argue that rational requirements codify an agential coherence that you negotiate through a dynamic of self-trust and self-mistrust. It is not reasoning to abandon your judgment through forgetfulness, confusion or perverse self-rebellion. But it can be reasoning to abandon your judgment through reasonable self-mistrust. The difference lies in how self-mistrust can manifest a sensitivity to the norm of rational coherence that gives normative force to rational requirements. The core insight of those who defend the possibility of ‘rational’ akrasia lies in their emphasis on the rational force of self-mistrust.
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Notes
I take the stream metaphor from Kolodny (2005, 2007a), though like any metaphor it can mislead. The stream flows from judgment to choice or intention. But in another sense the only ‘flow’ here is the process of your reasoning. Of course, when you reason ‘upstream’ you are not at all swimming against that! Talk of ‘reasoning’ can also mislead: we are not assuming that all reasoning involves the deliberative weighing of reasons. A non-metaphorical way of putting the thesis will emerge in Sects. 3–5.
Note also that by ‘akrasia’ I’ll not mean what Richard Holton means by ‘weakness of will’ (2009, pp. 70–71). I’ll be talking about a failure to follow through on—that is, to commit to—your all-things-considered judgment by failing to intend accordingly. Holton, by contrast, is talking about a failure to follow through—that is, to act—on your intention. For more on the distinction between the judgment-to-commitment rational nexus and the commitment-to-action rational nexus, see Hinchman (2009).
Note how the reply that Arpaly reports Michael Smith making in personal communication (2000, pp. 498–501; 2003, pp. 43–46) appears to appeal to the agent’s untrustworthiness in judging. Without a reconceptualization of rational coherence along the lines we’ll pursue, such a reply cannot overcome the objections that Arpaly presses against Smith’s.
Of course, you might have ulterior reasons for retaining the judgment—for example, a payoff directly for that. No such reasons are in play in the sort of case we’re considering.
As Broome acknowledges, the worry about bootstrapping generalizes an argument made earlier by Bratman (1987, pp. 24–27).
For the more fundamental claim, see the papers cited in the first sentence of note 6 above. For some observations on the grounds for this attribution, see Kolodny (2005, p. 514, n. 5). As I’m about to observe (see note 9 below), Broome has more recently pulled back from the claim.
Kolodny (2005, pp. 557–560; 2007b, pp. 242–244; 2008a, pp. 456–462; 2008b, pp. 387–390). Note that Kolodny makes no appeal to a subjective species of rationality. Nor, as his exchange with Jason Bridges makes clear (Bridges 2009; Kolodny 2009), does Kolodny hold that it seems that your judgment itself gives you a reason to follow through on it. He claims merely that when you make a judgment it always seems to you that you have a reason to follow through on it.
In his 1999 Broome calls this a ‘non-detaching’ normative relation (as opposed to narrow-scope ‘detaching’ relations). The terminology of ‘narrow scope’ and ‘wide scope’ appears for the first time in Broome (2004). In the concluding sections of Broome (2007d), he argues that for reasons that echo Kolodny’s criticisms “we shall need to go beyond either formulation,” but he concedes that he has “not yet explored these options” (pp. 36–37).
What I’m calling his ‘main’ argument is in fact Kolodny’s third argument against Broome on this point. Kolodny first observes that “our ordinary attributions of irrationality are at least sometimes about what people do, or refuse to do, over time” (2007a, p. 371), which suggests that at least some of the requirements at issue are process requirements. He next observes that at least some of these requirements “can function as advice or guide your deliberation” (2007a, pp. 371–372), which appears to conflict with Broome’s claim that they are state requirements, since a state requirement tells you merely to avoid a certain state without telling which of the two ways of doing so to pursue. These arguments fail to do much damage, however, since Broome can reply that avoiding or exiting from an irrational state is, first, something that people do or fail to do over time and, second, something that you can advise someone to do, where the content of the advice is disjunctive. There is nothing in general problematic about disjunctive advice, or about the idea that one is guided by disjunctive advice. True, you cannot determine what to do if that is all you go by. But there is no reason to think that the rational requirement is all the subject has to go by.
In both Wide Process K and in this quoted passage, Kolodny has “X” instead of “φ.” Kolodny goes on (2007a, pp. 379–381) to consider the idea that you might reason upstream from other believed contents in the neighborhood of your failure to intend to φ. But, as he rightly notes, if that is how we construe the second disjunct of our Wide Process, and if you have no such other beliefs, then all we have left is the first disjunct, and our Wide Process collapses into Narrow Process.
I pursue this point toward a challenge to Kolodny’s error-theoretic treatment of the normativity of rationality in “Reasons and Rational Coherence,” in preparation. But that challenge need play no role in the argument we’re developing here.
Of course, one can also reason about one’s attitudes. But then the transitions that constitute the process of reasoning have second-order contents, which is not the case we’re considering.
By ‘self-mistrust’ I don’t mean mistrusting yourself in general but merely in the specific instance at hand. A more general attitude of self-mistrust may emerge, but it need not. And I’m not talking about mistrusting your judgment sans phrase, but about mistrusting a specific judgment you’ve made on a specific matter at hand. By ‘trust your judgment,’ I’ll always mean trust a specific judgment, never trust your faculty of judgment.
I’ll devote the entirety of Sect. 6 to diagnosing confusions in the literature on this and related points. For now, let me simply stipulate that the relations of self-trust and self-mistrust that I’ll be discussing need not be mediated by judgments of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.
Kolodny’s explicit argument against upstream reasoning continues through Sect. 1.8 (2005, pp. 534–539), where the emphasis likewise falls on this possibility and not on the possibility that we’re investigating.
This difference in formulation will matter in Sect. 6, where I’ll argue that Kolodny’s formulation is misleading in a crucial respect.
In Hinchman (2009) I argue from a similar emphasis on self-trust that intending to φ presupposes judging, all things considered, that you ought to φ. I thus do not regard this as a possible case.
For an important caveat on the stream metaphor, see again note 1 above.
For this reading, see Holton, “Inverse Akrasia and Weakness of Will,” unpublished. (Bennett 1974 first cited Huck in this connection.)
I am not, however, addressing the traditional problem of akrasia in this paper. (I offer a full treatment of akrasia in Hinchman (2009), explaining how akrasia is possible despite its apparent unintelligibility.)
From another angle, we can cite the role of trustworthiness in enkrateia to qualify Broome’s strictures against bootstrapping. Worries about bootstrapping naturally apply to any case like Huck’s, in which the untrustworthiness of the judgment is manifest from the agent’s own point of view. We certainly would not want to say that Huck acquires a reason to betray Jim simply through having formed the judgment that he ought to betray Jim. But what if yet another variant on Huck—call him ‘Schmuck’—were disposed not to mistrust the judgment that he ought to betray Jim? In that case we might want to say that because the judgment is trustworthy from Schmuck’s narrowly subjective point of view, Schmuck acquires a ‘subjective’ reason to betray Jim—meaning merely that enkrateia requires this of Schmuck. If we don’t want to speak of ‘subjective reasons,’ we can observe that Schmuck’s judgment is no more worthy of his trust than Huck’s. We agree that neither Huck nor Schmuck ought to betray Jim and therefore that neither ought to trust his judgment. By an argument that I pursue in “Reasons and Rational Coherence,” in preparation, I’m inclined toward this latter position, on which his judgment’s untrustworthiness—still from his own point of view, but not from the narrowly subjective point of view of what he is disposed to mistrust—ensures that he does not bootstrap his way into possessing a reason to betray Jim. But nothing in this paper requires that we decide the issue.
Or say you’re in the predicament of Lord Fawn as described by Frankfurt (1988, p. 183). My emphasis on self-trust might then replace Frankfurt’s emphasis on “necessities of the will.”
This complements a further observation: to form an all-things-considered practical judgment, you must expect, not necessarily that you will choose or intend accordingly, but that it would be then rational—that is, rational from the perspective of this future self—to undertake that practical commitment. This appears to be the judgment-to-commitment analogue of a point that is much discussed and debated about the commitment-to-action nexus: can you form the intention to φ when you believe you will not φ? In Hinchman (2003, Sect. V), I argue that when you form an intention to φ, you need to believe not that you will φ but merely that you thereby make it non-deliberatively rational for your acting self to φ insofar as that self simply follows through on the intention. Each nexus is governed, looking forward, by the expectation of reasonable self-trust.
This is Kolodny’s argument in Sect. 1.8 of his 2005 (pp. 534–539). Each of the cases that he considers there—two “simple cases” and one more complex—counts as downstream reasoning because it presents your akratic resistance to judgment as generating evidence about your reasons to which it presents your judgment as responding. We’ve already dealt with two other aspects of Kolodny’s treatment of upstream reasoning in that section. First, each of the cases that he considers frames the issue of upstream reasoning in the way that I criticized in Sect. 3 above. As we’re seen, the question is not, as Kolodny poses it, whether you can reason upstream from an akratic intention to φ to abandoning your judgment that you lack sufficient reason to φ. The question is whether you can reason upstream from an akratic failure to φ to abandoning your judgment that you have sufficient (i.e. conclusive) reason to φ. Second, I am obviously not conflating the distinction between subjective and objective reasons in the way that Kolodny thinks likely to inform any purported vindication of upstream reasoning. The whole point of my argument in this paper is to shift the question of rational akrasia away from any conception of rationality as responsiveness to objective reasons and toward a conception of rationality as subjective coherence.
In his 1998 (pp. 25–30) Scanlon argues that we should restrict the term ‘irrational’ to cases in which your attitudes fail to conform to your judgments about reasons, but in his 2007 he merely distinguishes such structural irrationality from the substantive species of irrationality that I’m calling ‘deliberative.’ Since Scanlon agrees with Broome and Kolodny that only substantive (ir)rationality traffics in reasons, one could express my conclusion as the thesis that, properly understood, even structural (ir)rationality is substantive. But that formulation would be misleading. My principal aim is not to undermine the distinction between structural and substantive species of rationality but to recast it in a way that gives the concept of reasoning crucial work to do on both sides of the distinction. (Note that although Kolodny, citing Scanlon (2005, p. 560, n. 49), speaks of a ‘belief’ about evidence or reasons (e.g. 2005, p. 521), rather than (with Scanlon) of a ‘judgment,’ that merely reflects the fact that Scanlon does not himself draw the sharp distinction between judgment and belief on which I’m insisting.)
In his 2007 Scanlon distinguishes “attitude-directed” from “content-directed” judgments (pp. 90–91), but the latter are nonetheless about reasons; what distinguishes them is merely that they are not explicitly about reasons for other judgments. He makes the distinction in reply to a worry that attitude-directed judgments are “somewhat artificial” (p. 91): it’s more natural to “direct our attention to the world” when we deliberate rather than to our further judgments. That’s importantly true. But for our purposes it won’t matter on which side of this distinction a given judgment lies.
Scanlon uses ‘decision’ to mark a practical commitment.
As Wittgenstein epigrammatically observes, “One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief” (1956, p. 190). And as Richard Moran observes, commenting on this passage, “this must mean not that I take my beliefs to be so much more trustworthy than my senses, but that neither trust nor mistrust has any application here” (2001, p. 75).
I pursue this argument fully in “Judging as Inviting Self-Trust,” in preparation.
For one such an ‘externalist’ thesis, see Wallace (2001, pp. 9–10).
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Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to T. M. Scanlon, Paulina Sliwa, Jesse Summers, Valerie Tiberius, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on a previous draft, and to audience members at the 2012 NUSTEP conference at Northwestern University for helpful discussion.
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Hinchman, E.S. Rational requirements and ‘rational’ akrasia. Philos Stud 166, 529–552 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9993-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9993-5