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Perverse Preference: Self-Beguilement Or Self-Division?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Pugmire
David Pugmire*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, S09 SNH, United Kingdom
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Extract

Human folly, it seems, traces not only to ignorance and impulsiveness but also to the power of wishes that the erring agent acknowledges as unfit to motivate him. The possibility of genuinely perverse preference can be either denied or explained. To explain it, sense must be made of how a person’s understanding of the choices before him could fail to decide his preference—how what convinces could fail to persuade. The question is how the influence a given consideration has over a person’s choice can be other than a function of the beliefs he holds about its merits, so that as between competing considerations the one esteemed best doesn’t win, despite continuing to be esteemed best.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 73 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1994

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References

1 Davidson, Donald ‘How Is Weakness of Will Possible?’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), 21–43Google Scholar

2 Rorty, A. ‘Akrasia and Conflict,’ Inquiry 22 (1980) 193–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 209

3 Mele, A.R. Irrationality (New York: Oxford University Press 1987), 35–41Google Scholar

4 On the distinction and separability of judgment and emotional feelings see especially Leighton, S. ‘Feelings and Emotion,’ Review of Metaphysics 38 (1984) 303-20Google Scholar; and Stocker, M. ‘Psychic Feelings: Their Importance and Irreducibility,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983) 5–26Google Scholar.

5 For the difference in cases of ambivalence, between emotions and desires on the one hand and judgments on the other, see Robinson, Jennifer ‘Emotion, Judgment, and Desire,’ Journal of PHilosophy 80 (1983) 731-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Naturally, a person who is generally self-disciplined and apt to heed sober self-injunctions may occasionally meet serious temptation and even succumb to it. Doubtless his disposition to respond to self-remonstration could rescue him from such slippages, but how often it would is uncertain: someone with the habit of obedience to self-injunctions will usually not be incontinent, for he will presumably tend to back his better judgment, when necessary, by these injunctions that he habitually obeys. That he should be capable of incontinence at all (where even self-injunction fails- ‘You idiot! What are you doing? Get a grip on yourself!’) suggests that where desire can bring off mutiny against better judgment it may well succeed against self-injunction. The type of temptation that could seriously threaten him with akrasia is the type that may render all his normal resources unreliable.

7 I am grateful to an anonymous referee of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for raising this possibility.

8 This is not to deny that there are steps I can take against my weaknesses. I might seek therapy in the hope of lessening my disposition to a given sort of renegade desire, or I might regulate my attention (or movements) so as to prevent the full awakening of this disposition. However, these are ways of avoiding the rise of a stronger renegade desire, not ways of resisting the strength of an akrasia-inducing desire already awakened to the full.

9 Mele himself accords motivational force to final judgments about what it is best to do: insofar as they issue from deliberation they are motivated by the wish to do what is best, and they will tend to produce the intention so to act in the absence of ‘preemptive conditions’ (A.R. Mele, ‘Akratic Action and the Practical Role of Better Judgment,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 [1991] 33-47, at 44). Surely the default motivational force of a final judgment must be yet stronger. The full force of the wish to do what is best is not mobilized just by the acceptance that A is for the best but by full insight into what and how it is for the best. This judgment results from appreciating the precise ways in which one's interests would be affected by the actions at hand, as contrasted with just accepting that they would be affected for the best, e.g., on the say-so of a trusted mentor or oracle or received moral precept. Barring schizoid detachment from the person's own perceived interests, this should mobilize desire for the protection of these interests. Naturally the force of this desire could be diminished if ‘preemptive conditions’ already existed (e.g. in the shape of renegade desires); but their remission at that stage could only be to subvert the deliberation (e.g. its honesty or thoroughness) and allow at best what Davidson terms an’ all things considered’ judgment to be struck, rather than the unconditional judgment traduced in the ‘strict’ akrasia under discussion. This is not, of course, to imply that the default motivation of a final judgment will inevitably issue in the continent intention. The resources of strict akrasia may not (perhaps cannot) be restricted to the mere presence of renegade desires.

10 Davidson, Donald ‘Paradoxes of Irrationality,’ in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. Philosophical Essays on Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982), 289–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 303

11 Heil, J. ‘Minds Divided,’ Mind 98 (1989) 571-83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 581

12 Pears, D. Motivated Irrationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 69Google Scholar

13 The case of Ian's malingering is instructive. We have seen that the desire to refrain from attempting self-control can only be weaker than the desire to go on indulging if no attempt at self-control is in the offing. This is because an attempt at self-control is an attempt that involves terminating what Ian most desires, and he can be indifferent to that only to the extent that he is indifferent to prolonging his indulgence (which he isn't). There is one way around this. An intention to try self-control could fail to elicit re-enforcement of the desire to block self-control if Ian did not recognize the intended self-control as a threat to his continued watching. The relation between the intended act of self-control and his enjoyment would have to be opaque to him. As if the self-control were being undertaken by someone else who could conceal it. This would permit strategic focusing in the service of self-control, but it amounts to partitioning. The attentional strategy is only possible on the basis of partitioning.

14 Wiggins, David ‘Weakness of Will, Commensurability and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire,’ in Rorty, A.O. Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980), 241-67Google Scholar, at 256-7

15 Walker, A.F. ‘The Problem of Weakness of Will,’ Nous 22 (1989) 653-66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 671

16 See also note 13.