Akrasia, collective and individual

Abstract

Perhaps the most famous analogy in the history of philosophical argument is that which Plato draws in the Republic between the constitution of the city and the constitution of the soul. The analogy is justly famous, for it sheds light on many aspects of mentality and personhood. In particular, as I shall try to show here, the analogy — or at least something close to the analogy — sheds light on the nature of akrasia or lack of self-control. How to characterise akrasia? Without going into an analysis of our ordinary conceptions of the phenomena associated with this term, I shall assume that an agent is akratic when the following conditions are fulfilled. The agent holds by intentional states in the light of which a certain response presents itself as required; the states involved may be beliefs or desires, judgments or intentions, or whatever. The agent functions under conditions that are intuitively favourable, and within limits that are intuitively feasible, for acting as required; there is nothing abnormal about how things transpire within their constitution or circumstances — no malfunction, for example, or perturbation. But nevertheless the agent fails to act in the required manner. This is a broad conception of akrasia and may not coincide in extension with received notions like that of weakness of will. Moreover, the conception described is going to vary in extension with any variation of extension in the related conception of normal conditions (Pettit 1999): for the record, I think that conditions of functioning will be abnormal so far as a person is affected by blind spots, idees fixes or fallacious habits of reasoning, or by affective pathologies or ineradicable compulsions, or is subject to mesmerising external forces of intimidation or temptation. But though the conception of akrasia is tied up in this way with the theory of normal conditions, and is not necessarily designed to track any received notions, still the phenomenon it purports to track — assuming that there is indeed a phenomenon that answers to the conception — is bound to be of the greatest interest. I look here at what is necessary for a group to constitute an agent that can display akrasia in this sense, and at what steps such a group might take to establish self-control. I do so, not just because the topic has some interest in itself, but — the Platonic message — because the discussion suggests some lessons about how we should think of akrasia in the individual as well as in the collective case. Under the image that the lessons support, akrasia is a sort of constitutional disorder: a failure to achieve a unity projected in the avowal of agency. This image fits well with the constitutional model of the soul that Christine Korsgaard (1999) finds in Plato’s analogy and her explication of the analogy offers a precedent — and indeed a prompt — for the line taken here. The paper is in three sections. In the first I look at three sorts of groups that are incapable, so I argue, of akrasia; these I describe respectively as mere collections of individuals, mere aggregations, and ordered aggregations. In the second section I introduce a further sort of group, which I describe as an integration of individuals, and I argue that this is capable of akratic behaviour. And then in the final section I draw out some lessons of the discussion that bear on individual as well as collective akrasia