Weakness of Will
You know the better course — and take the worse anyway: the ancient puzzle of acting against your own clear judgment.
Akrasia is 'weakness of will' — acting against what you yourself judge to be best, like reaching for the dessert you'd resolved to skip. Socrates (5th century BCE), as Plato portrays him in the Protagoras, provocatively denied it was even possible: no one, he argued, knowingly does wrong, so what looks like weakness is really ignorance. Aristotle (4th century BCE) took the puzzle more seriously in Nicomachean Ethics VII, explaining how passion can override knowledge that is 'present but not active.' The problem has occupied moral philosophers ever since.
How it traveled
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- Sha'arei AvodahStrashelye · 1820
- Likutei HalakhotBreslov (Ukraine) · 1840
- Malbim on ProverbsBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on PsalmsBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on IsaiahBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on GenesisBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on JeremiahBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on DeuteronomyBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on NumbersBucharest · 1860
- Torah Temimah on TorahPinsk · 1904
- Historia RomanaRomeexplains
- Jewish Antiquities—explains
- Catena In Epistulam Ad Romanos (Typus Monacensis) (E Cod. Monac. gr. 412)—explains
- Legum Allegoriarum Libri I-III—explains
Key passages(20)
In Ethica Nicomachea Paraphrasis (Pseudepigraphum Olim A Constantino Palaeocappa confectum et olim sub auctore Heliodoro Prusensi vel Andronico Rhodio vel Olympiodoro) · Anonymi In Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea
It remains, therefore, to consider whether acting as we wish and acting voluntarily are the same. This also seems impossible. For it is a fundamental assumption with us, and a general opinion, that wi
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Again, all wickedness makes a man more unrighteous, and lack of self-control seems to be wickedness; and the uncontrolled man is the sort of man to act in conformity with desire contrary to calculatio
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From these considerations, then, it would appear that what is in conformity with desire is voluntary; and from this the opposite follows, for all that a man does voluntarily he wishes to do, and what
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