Akrasia

Akrasia, occasionally transliterated as acrasia (from Greek, "lacking command (over oneself)") is the state of acting against one's better judgment. Although this philosopher's technical term is usually employed in its Greek form (i.e., akrasia/akratic) in English texts, it was once the philosophers' English language convention to use the precise English equivalent of akrasia/akratic, incontinence/incontinent. However, it now seems that the correct, widely established convention is to use the term akrasia.

Psychologists are well aware that some people are more able to defer gratification than others; that is, some people are more able to refuse a small reward now for the sake of a bigger reward later. The question is why this should be so.

History
The problem goes back at least as far as Plato. Socrates (in Plato's Protagoras) asks precisely how this is possible - if one judges action A to be the best course of action, why would one do anything other than A?

Donald Davidson sees the problem as one of reconciling the following apparently inconsistent triad:
 * If an agent believes A to be better than B, then he wants to do A more than B.
 * If an agent wants to do A more than B, then he will do A rather than B if he only does one.
 * Sometimes an agent acts against his better judgment.

Davidson solves the problem by saying that, when people act in this way, they temporarily believe that the worse course of action is better, because they have not made an all-things-considered judgment, but only a judgment based on a subset of possible considerations.

Another explanation is that there are different forms of motivation which can conflict with each other. Throughout the ages, many have identified a conflict between reason and emotion, which might make it possible to believe that one should do A rather than B, but still end up wanting to do B more than A.

Views on akrasia
Much of the philosophical literature takes akrasia to be the same thing as weakness of the will. So, for example, a smoker who wants to quit - yet cannot - acts against her better judgment (that quitting smoking is best) due to a weak will. But a few have challenged the link. Richard Holton for example sees weakness of the will as a tendency to revise one's judgment about what is best too easily. So the smoker might one moment feel that she should give up, but at another that the joy of smoking outweighs the risks, oscillating back and forth between judgments. Such a person has a weak will but is not acting akratically.

Under this view, it is also possible to act against one's better judgment, but without weakness of will. One might, for example, decide that taking revenge upon a murderer is both immoral and imprudent, but decide to take revenge anyway, and never flinch from this decision. Such a person behaves akratically but does not show weakness of will.

Other uses of the term:

 * A rock band from Pittsburgh.
 * Acrasia, a character in The Faerie Queene, an epic poem by Edmund Spenser.