Weakness of willpower and facing dilemmas

This being said, here is the plan for the chapter. In section 5.2. I’ll get clear on the idea of dilemma facing and on why this is important for weakness of willpower.

Then, in section 5.3. I’ll present my overall picture of epistemic inefficacy by means of a concrete and detailed example, and my reasons for thinking that this is weakness of willpower’s closest intellectual equivalent. Then I’ll proceed to discuss the relevant ways in which epistemic inefficacy is different from other vices and other epistemic misconducts with which it can be all too easily conflated. Section 5.4. delves into the differences between epistemic inefficacy and the vice of close-mindedness, while section 5.5. presents the differences between epistemic inefficacy and sub-personal states that might resemble it superficially. I’ll conclude, in section 5.6., by presenting a preliminary profiling, with the vice’s most remarkable prototypical traits seen so far.

The precise ways in which epistemic inefficacy squares of as a vice, following the obstructivist approach to vice epistemology presented in Chapter 4, will be dealt with in a detailed way in Chapter 6.

It’s not a mere coincidence that even the most archaic descriptions of the phenomenon mention that the experience is commonly followed by self-awareness of one’s failing to abide by his or her own general principles, as well as by some form of regret, like Aristotle remarks in the Nichomaquean Ethics (EN VII 7 1150a 20). I don’t interpret this as entailing that people that are guilty of weakness of willpower necessarily experiment dramatic suffering, nor that they necessarily have the feeling of regret, but I do consider it worth noticing that there is a reflexive nature to the experience, and that the person who undergoes it is in good faith. For, without these, neither suffering or regret would be possible to come by.

If follows from these observations that it doesn’t make sense to apply the label

“weakness of willpower” to people who are acting in seemingly alien ways but who are not, literally, undergoing conflict while dealing with the conflicting possibilities of action placed before them. That is, weakness of willpower does not apply to people who are not struggling in the face of a dilemma. To face a dilemma is to envisage opposite possibilities of action and to hesitate before them⁵⁵.

Many of the dilemmas we face in our lives are epistemic. They require deciding between two rival epistemic possibilities: to draw conclusion A instead of conclusion B; to underwrite theory A to the detriment of theory B; to abandon line of investigation A in order to pursue line of inquiry B, and so forth. Sometimes those dilemmas go away quite smoothly, and quickly. Upon reassessing the evidence, people decide that conclusion A is what follows, instead of conclusion B. Upon performing more tests, scientists decide that theory A is more accurate than the rival theory B. And so forth. Those are the cases that do not interest me here, precisely because they involve no struggle on the agent’s part. Cases of dilemmas that resolve themselves do not test a person’s willpower, or her efficacy as a problem-solver.

Not all epistemic dilemmas, however, unfold like this. That’s because sometimes a person finds herself being unable to resolve a particular conflict between two rival epistemic possibilities. She accesses more evidence, but she finds that the evidence doesn’t settle the matter. She conducts more tests, but then finds that the tests too don’t conclusively rule out either of the two possibilities envisaged.

And so forth. What happens in situations of this sort is that the person is forced to put

55It is worth noticing that it follows from these observations that most, if not all, of the cases discussed in Chapter 1 are not really equivalents of weakness of willpower in the epistemic realm, in spite of their having been presented by scholars as alleged examples of “epistemic akrasia”.

up with inconsistency (the inconsistency that exists between the two rival possibilities, since they cannot both be accepted, but none of the two have been ruled out yet). This is the type of situation that often tests a person’s intellectual willpower. That is, this is the type of situation in which intellectual weakness of the relevant kind can become salient.

But it actually gets a little more complicated than that. Weakness of willpower is not just a matter of the person experiencing dilemma, but rather a matter of he or she experiencing a dilemma that she shouldn’t be experiencing. Think like this: if you have a general guideline for living, or a principle regarding how to handle matters of some particular type, according to which the right thing for you to do is A, and yet you struggle when you find yourself in a situation in which you can do either A or B, then this is a dilemma you shouldn’t be facing. If you have really committed yourself to that general guideline, it’s admissible that you hesitate for a little while, but that’s all.

That’s the most longstanding your dilemma should be, if you were an impeccably reasonable person who always abides by your principles. An impeccably reasonable person is one who already got over the point in life where option B offers real temptation.

Nevertheless, many times people have not got over it. They’re still living in that place in life where they are tempted by option B, in spite of seeing themselves as committed to a principle according to which the right choice is A. When a person is that place in life, so to speak, she will be tempted by option B even though she has much better reason to choose A, and this raises a red flag in terms of her strength of willpower, even if in the end she ends up choosing in accordance with her general principle. The crucial intuition this observation gives us is: weakness of willpower has to do not only with facing dilemma, but with being caught up within the dilemma for longer than you should.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can stipulate a maximum duration for one’s struggle in the face of a dilemma, so that if the person exceeds that duration she automatically qualifies as lacking willpower. What I do mean, though, is that some dilemmas are of such nature that they have a “turning point”. There is a point in the unfoldment of person’s dealing with some types of dilemmas, in a way that, once you go past this point without having achieved success (resolution), you begin to be considered unreasonable. Usually, that’s the point where epistemic reasons in favour of option A has irreversibly or nearly irreversibly outweighed epistemic reasons in

favour of option B. So weakness of the relevant kind happens when the person keeps treating the dilemma as an open case past this point. Where exactly this point is, or where the line is to be drawn, is usually circumstantial and will vary in each case.

For instance, if you have sincerely committed yourself to the principles of a Christian monastic life but then you keep finding it difficult to abide by monastic rule, being tormented by temptations beyond that reasonability point (wherever and however the bar turns out to have been set), what happens is that after a while we begin to suspect that there is something wrong: either your adhesion was not really collected and sincere, or you lack the willpower to actualize it in action. If your adhesion was indeed collected and sincere (meaning: if you are in good faith), then you lack the power to actualize it in action. You are akratic.

Likewise with epistemic situations. If you are an expert in a field and you have a general guideline, or a rule of thumb, about how to handle issues of some particular type, according to which the right thing for you to do when you have to deal with these issues is A, if you are an excellent problem-solver in your field, that is, a person with maximal epistemic efficacy, you wouldn’t feel tempted to deal with the relevant problem in way B, or in any other way that you consider sub-optimal. If you struggle when you find yourself in a situation in which either A or B look possible, then this is either because you are not really committed to that general guideline that prescribes A, or because you don’t have maximal epistemic efficacy as a problem-solver in the field (and this is regardless of your general guideline being right or wrong).

To be sure, nobody has complete epistemic efficacy in any field, or, at least, nobody should see themselves as enjoying any perfect skills. Which means, everybody could find themselves facing dilemma in any field, that is, everybody, even experts, could find themselves considering option B and weighting it against option A at some time. What is crucial in this case is how long this is going to last for. If it extends itself past the point in which reasons pro-A have outweighed reasons pro-B in a way that is very unlikely that the weigh balance can reverse itself, there you have it.

Here is a more illustrative example. Say you are a novice physician and you’ve learnt that there is no serious scientific evidence linking antiperspirants to breast cancer, like a popular theory disseminated in the 1990’s used to hold. But then you keep finding it difficult to not think that your patients’ breast cancer is a reflex of

antiperspirants use, when you see them arriving at your clinic wearing a ton of it. It’s alright if it happens once, or for a short while. But after it has lasted long enough (too much inquiring towards a patient’s hygiene habits to see if her disease can be traced back to antiperspirants), or after iteration (too many patients having their antiperspirants use inquired about), we’ll begin to suspect that there is something wrong with you. Either you haven’t really understood or accepted the data, or it is as though you lack the intellectual “guts”, so to speak, to actualize it in your conduct. If you’ve understood the data and you’ve fully accepted it, i.e., you have no caveats about the data’s authenticity, for example then it is as though you lack the guts to actualize that knowledge in your own conduct.

Now, practically speaking, what we do observe when we see cases of seemingly stubborn physicians in real life is that nobody that adopts this conduct, that is, no physician that spends valuable time and resources tracking specific factors like this does so from a neutral standpoint. That is, nobody does this without believing, at least to a certain extent, that the factor-hypothesis has not been completely ruled out.

Those people accept the data, but they don’t think that the data is strong enough to completely undermine the old theory either. So they think that there is still a chance that that old theory is valuable or, at least, not completely mistaken. That there is some truth to it, that just hasn’t been backed up by the data yet.

This is another way of saying that those people have some degree of commitment to the theory, in addition to their commitment to the general principle that a medical practitioner should base his practice on theories that are backed up by the best evidence in the field. Some degree of commitment to the idea that represents the weaker alternative in a dilemma (in this case, the antiperspirant hypothesis) is what causes the person to linger herself in facing that particular dilemma past the reasonable point. We’ll get back to this in section 5.3.

In the next section we’ll examine epistemic inefficacy it in a more detailed way, from the analysis of an extended concrete example.