Akrasia and Weakness of Will: A Phenomenological Approach

In explaining our own actions or those of others, we typically implicitly presume a certain background rationality supporting those actions. More specifically, we assume that people, when given freedom and enough time to choose between several different courses of action, choose to follow the one they judge to be the most beneficial to them. This simple and intuitive assumption underpins a great deal of our theoretical and practical understanding of human behavior. Yet our everyday lives are riddled with situations where we seemingly act against our better judgment, and freely and intentionally choose to do things we know are bad for us, or worse than the available alternatives: for example, we abandon beneficial resolutions all too easily, procrastinate endlessly, ignore our common sense, or slip into addictive patterns while knowing their dangers full well. But how is it possible that we seemingly willingly act in these self-destructive ways, and are there ways of avoiding or preventing this? Philosophers refer to these and similar kinds of actions as akratic (displaying a lack of self-control) or weak-willed actions. Understandably, various sciences and scientific disciplines ranging from philosophy and moral psychology to rational choice theory and psychopathology have worked together to illuminate important aspects of such actions. However, contemporary scholarship in these fields is disproportionately focused on singular akratic and weak-willed actions, and thus largely ignores a crucial facet of the problem: the holistic context of the agent performing them. This project aims to rectify this major lacuna in the research by providing a systematic descriptive and explanatory account of the akratic or weak-willed agent. This will be accomplished by employing the specific methods and conceptual resources of phenomenology. The significant philosophical relevance of this tradition has been mostly overlooked in the context of this problem. This project will create a productive dialogue between phenomenology and present scholarship on akrasia and weakness of will, and will argue that phenomenology is uniquely capable of providing the necessary broader perspective on this problem.