Akrasia

Akrasia is the Greek term for acting against one’s own better judgment: knowingly choosing what you yourself judge to be the worse option. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates denies the phenomenon is even possible. Virtue is knowledge, people pursue what they perceive as good, and anyone who knows the best course will act on it. On this view, what looks like akrasia is incomplete knowledge.

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• Aristotle breaks with Socratic intellectualism in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII: akrasia comes from a person’s opinion (doxa), not their desire (epithumia). Desire is neither true nor false, but opinion can simply be wrong, which is enough to explain acting against a mistaken “best judgment.”
• Aristotle’s opposite term is enkrateia, having power over one’s own desires; he ties akrasia most closely to bodily enjoyment and treats it as a failure to act on knowledge rather than a vice proper, since it isn’t a product of deliberate moral choice.
• Donald Davidson reframes the puzzle as an inconsistent triad: believing A better than B should mean wanting A more, wanting A more should mean choosing A, yet people sometimes choose B anyway. He resolves it by arguing akratic choices rest on an incomplete, not all-things-considered, judgment.
• Richard Holton separates akrasia from weakness of will: someone who resolves on a course of action and sticks to it despite judging it wrong is acting akratically without being weak-willed, since weakness of will is specifically about revising resolutions too easily.
• Psychologist George Ainslie attributes akrasia to hyperbolic discounting: people judge differently the closer they get to a reward, an empirical account rather than a purely conceptual one.
• The term resurfaces across literary history. Dante punishes incontinence across four circles of the Inferno, Spenser personifies it in The Faerie Queene, and Romanticism eventually inverts the value judgment, prizing feeling over reason where earlier traditions condemned exactly that choice.