Question It seems plausible that a person might do something they don't want to do, without any external pressure. For example, a person on a diet might cheat and eat a bar of chocolate, even though they don't want to cheat; or a person trying to quit smoking might smoke a cigarette even if they don't want to smoke the cigarette. And yet, these are actions which require conscious activity in order to complete - these aren't accidents, and so it seems fair to say that, on some level, even if the person on a diet doesn't want to eat the chocolate, he or she does, in fact, want to eat the chocolate. This seems absolutely contradictory - yet surely, everybody has, at some point or another in their life, given in to some temptation despite not wanting to, or otherwise done something that they, in strong terms, did not want to do, even though they weren't forced to do so. How, then, are we to make sense of such situations? It seems logically impossible to both want to eat something and to want to refrain from eating something; in effect, the statement "I want to eat that chocolate bar" is simultaneously true and false. What sorts of statements can be both at once? Is it enough to just say that people have many different, competing wants? Is the will, then, a fractured entity, or not an entity at all? Would not notions such as guilt and responsibility need to be radically overlooked if we were to assume that a person's will is just a fractured jumble of dozens of competing, mutually exclusive desires?

Accepted:

November 26, 2010