Akrasia

His [Homer's] Olympian gods live by passion and propensity rather than by principle; their besetting sin is a fault of inclination to what they like, not of absolute malignity; it belongs to the akrasia, not the absolute kakia of Aristotle.

The Atasthalié of Homer seems to hold to his Atè a relation resembling that between the kakia and the akrasia of Aristotle: the one indicating innate mischief, the other only inadequate means of defence against evil when it solicits from without.

What I think this depicts is a relationship between the reasons we have to act and the action we do. This problem of acrasia suggests that sometimes we have those reasons. We think smoking is bad for health so the action we would expect is that we would refrain from smoking. Instead, we smoke.

So when the badness of a poor doctor or actor is said to be 'similar by analogy' to badness proper[…], and this is used to shed light on the 'similarity' between acrasia proper and the acrasias in respect of anger, honour, and gain[…], the thought must be that a bad doctor stands to doctoring more or less as a bad man stands to action, while a choleric acratic stands to anger more or less as an acratic proper stands to bodily pleasure.

Augustine's original interpretation of our human condition is that we struggle and fail to do what we want to do and know that we ought to do – the classical problem of weakness of will or acrasia. […] We recognize acrasia in ourselves […] it is an acrasia which is tied to specific weaknesses: the man who yearns for vodka, and who tries and fails to limit his vodka-intake, may have no serious difficulty in avoiding over-eating.

If there are six severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of full-blooded akrasia, then perhaps the way to classify the varieties of akrasia and non-akrasia is by means of the statistical array generated by considering the permutations of the six conditions of akrasia. […] Examining this array may make it clear which types of akrasia logically cannot occur; what the range of possible partial akrasias is; and what kinds of cases are not akrasias at all.

I earlier […] introduced a notion of ‘hard acrasia’, that is, of a conscious failure to live up to what I judge to be best in what I desire most, choose, and do. We need to distinguish this from ‘soft acrasia’: in cases of soft acrasia, the agent’s perception is dimmed and his judgement deflected, so that he acts in a way that he would not have chosen in a cool hour, with judgement and perception unimpaired, and yet not with conscious contrariety to an occurrent choice, in cases of hard acrasia, his perception is clear, his judgement unequivocal—and yet, out of weakness, he acts otherwise.

Socrates undertakes to press this indictment against that explanation of acrasia which he takes to be by far the most common of all: that men who know the better will do the worse because they are "overcome" or "defeated" by desire for pleasures.

The paradigm case of akrasia is the person who seems to know that a certain type of food is healthy but is none the less led by desire to eat a more pleasurable food instead. This is an act of akrasia, rather than immoderation, because the agent appears to know better. But his desires are somehow able to prevail over his reason, and he acts as if he were immoderate. Aristotle proposes a variety of explanations for akrasia[…]; on my reading, his implication in all is that, despite appearances, the akratic lacks practical wisdom.

The structure of the brain exerts constraints on what is easy or difficult to compute—resulting not only in the limits of specific cognitive abilities but in the bounded nature of everyday rationality and our propensity for certain types of systematic biases, errors, and akrasias.