AKRASIA · ACTING AGAINST YOUR JUDGMENT
On the gap between judgment and behaviour — and on the objection that it is an environment problem wearing a character costume.
The decision was made on Sunday. Not vaguely — you sat down and thought about it, you had reasons, and the reasons were good. You could still recite them now.
It is Wednesday, it is one in the morning, and you are doing the other thing.
What is strange about this is not that it happens. It is that nothing has changed. No new argument arrived, nothing was refuted, and if somebody asked you right now what the right thing to do was you would tell them correctly, while continuing to do the other thing.
Socrates thought this was impossible. Nobody, he argued, knowingly chooses what is worse; the apparent cases are really cases of not knowing. It is a tidy position and it has the advantage of making the problem disappear.
Aristotle looked at people and disagreed, which is characteristic of him and is most of the reason this book is still worth reading. He named it akrasia — acting against your own settled judgment — and then had to explain how a thing he had just admitted was impossible actually works.
The distinction is between having knowledge and having it available at the moment of action. You can state the reasons perfectly and they can be doing nothing at all.
Which explains, among other things, why arguing with yourself at one in the morning does not work. The argument is not the missing piece. The argument was never the problem.
He then separates two kinds, and the distinction remains useful when examining the modern intention–behaviour gap. In one, you deliberate, reach a judgment, and are carried off by an appetite or a feeling. In the other — the one he calls impetuosity — you never deliberate at all. The thing happens, and the judgment arrives afterwards to be disappointed.
They feel identical in retrospect and they need opposite repairs. The first is about the strength of the pull at a moment that existed. The second is about the fact that no moment ever occurred, which means no amount of resolve at the decision point can help, because there was no decision point.
Paschal Sheeran’s meta-analytic work put a number on it.4 Across experimental studies, medium-to-large changes in intention produce only small-to-medium changes in behaviour. Intention predicts behaviour, and it predicts it considerably less well than people assume.
The useful detail is where the gap sits. It is not among people who do not intend to act — they reliably do not act. It is among the intenders, who split. Aristotle’s category picks out exactly the population the research finds interesting.
What closes some of it is specification rather than resolve. Implementation intentions work by removing the need for the intention to be re-consulted in the moment: a cue triggers the behaviour instead.5 That is his point about knowledge not operating, with a fix attached.
The strongest objection is that akrasia puts a structural problem inside a person.
The case against
If the behaviour is easy and the alternative requires an effort, the gap is a fact about the arrangement rather than about your resolve. The person who does not have the thing in the house does not have to resist it, and has demonstrated nothing whatever about themselves.
The research supports the relocation. Trait self-control correlates with having fewer temptations rather than with winning fights against them — people who look disciplined report less effortful resistance, not more, which is the next essay’s subject.
This also means the practice below is mostly environmental. Framing it as a problem of the will is not merely unhelpful; it aims effort at the one lever with the weakest evidence behind it.
Take one reliable gap and ask: did I deliberate and get carried off, or did it happen without a decision point?
If there was a decision point, the work is at that moment. Make the alternative concrete and available in advance, and reduce the number of things that have to be decided while you are standing there.
If there was no decision point, no amount of resolve helps, and the work is upstream. Something has to create the moment — a cue, an obstacle, another person — because you cannot exercise judgment at a point that never occurs.
And change the environment before anything else. It is the lever with the best evidence, and it is the one people reach for last because it feels like cheating rather than like winning.
One gap. The most reliable one, not the most shameful one.
Socrates thought this was impossible and Aristotle looked at people and disagreed. The knowledge is there and it is not operating, which is a better description than weakness and a considerably more workable one.
The gap is large in everybody, and the largest part of it sits among people who intend to act. That makes it a structural feature of how intention and behaviour relate rather than a fact about your character.
And the best available repairs are environmental and specificational. Arguing with yourself at one in the morning has the worst evidence of anything discussed here, and it is what almost everybody does.
You can state the reasons perfectly and have them do nothing, which is why arguing with yourself at one in the morning fails. The knowledge is there and not operating.
Most of this is an environment problem wearing a character costume — people who look disciplined report less effortful resistance, not more. Change the arrangement before the resolve.
Quotations are from the Nicomachean Ethics unless noted, cited by book, chapter and Bekker number; renderings follow W. D. Ross (rev. Urmson), Terence Irwin or Roger Crisp, and a condensed line is marked “after Aristotle”. Modern research is cited by author and publication.