Topics Rationality

Question Consider a person who wants to go jogging in order to improve their health, but never seem to actually be able to go out and jog, despite having lots of free time and, in many cases, nothing better to do. Some might call this laziness; but what is laziness? Is the person effectively choosing/wanting not to go jogging, and their belief that they want to jog is actually a misinterpretation of the simple feeling that they should jog, even if I don't want to? Or is the person choosing to jog, or truly wanting to jog in a relevant sense, and yet somehow failing to do so? If the latter, how can we conceptualize this failure to do something we want to do without any meaningful physical, organizational, social or institutional restrictions on our behavior? If a person has free will and nothing is standing in their way (neither the laws of nature nor their schedule), how can they fail to do things they truly want to do?

Accepted:
June 16, 2011

Comments

That is an excellent question that has fascinated philosphers from the beginning in the west. Socrates seems to have equated knowing an act is good with desiring it, and reasoning that if someone desires X they must (on some level) both think it good and do the act or try to do it (unless constrained internally by an injury, for example or some external constraint, e.g. chains). From a Socratic point of view, the person who seems to be in the situation of thinking jogging is good but electing not to jog (without good reason) must (on some level) think that jogging is not (or not always) good. For he or she to remain watching TV rather than go running, the person must think something like: in this case, it is ok because running can be dangerous and I might be hit by a car or [whatever]....and so it is perfectly fine for me to wait until tomorrow to go for a run. The greeks called this apparent liability for us not to do what we think we should akrasia, a term that is usually translated as "weakness of will" but could also be translated as "incontinence." Although some scholars disagree, I believe Plato and Aristotle basically accepted Socrates' position. Perhaps the most famous literary case on the other side would be St. Paul who in the New Testament confesses to doing the very thing he thinks is sinful.

Personally, I think akrasia is still an open issue philosophically! There may be a middle position, though, between Socrates and St. Paul: perhaps Socrates is right that on some level your wanna-be jogger has to consciously think it is ok for him or her not to jog, but there is some self-deception in play, and deep down (sub-consciously?), the person realizes that failing to run is wrong? Maybe Socrates and his student Plato and his student's student Aristotle got the conscious narrative right, but Paul was right about what lies beneath the surface?