Empirically-Informed Approaches to Weakness of Will: A Brains Blog Roundtable
Weakness of will is a traditional puzzle in the philosophy of action. The puzzle goes something like this:
FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY: If, at time t, an agent judges that it is better to do A than B, and she believes she is free to do A, then, provided she tries to do either at that time, she will try to do A and not B.
WEAKNESS OF WILL: An agent judges that it is better to do A than B, believes that she is free to do A, but tries to do B.
But taken together, these statements are inconsistent. FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY precludes the possibility of weakness of will (as characterized in WEAKNESS OF WILL), but WEAKNESS OF WILL asserts that it occurs. So can WEAKNESS OF WILL be possible, and if so, how?