Topics Ethics

Question Is it possible to truly, completely understand and know that a certain act is unethical or immoral, and yet still do it (absent any external pressures, or internal pathologies like psychopathy)? Or is it so that full knowledge of immorality exclude one from acting immorally, and that a person who behaves immorally actually doesn't understand the immorality of their actions?

Accepted:
July 5, 2011

Comments

You have identified the classic problem of AKRASIA (Greek for incontinence) and arguments that go back to Socrates' close connection between knowledge and ethics. Socrates and his student Plato, and Plato's student Aristotle, each found it puzzling how someone can do an act that he or she knows to be wrong. I actually share in this intuition because it is very hard to describe how an agent might willingly do what he or she fully and consciously acknowledges to be wrong. Arguably, if someone knows something (say, stealing from the vulnerable) is wrong, they thereby disapprove of it. So, when someone steals from the vulnerable they would have to simultaneously do the stealing (and thus on some level approve of it) while at the same time disapprove of it. The best way to address the issue (I suggest) and avoid thinking that all immoral agents either don't know what they are doing or they are pathological or subject to external forces, is to claim that we can know things on different levels and be subject to self-deception. So, I would be inclined to think that a thief might know (deep down or implicitly or sub-consciously) that his act is wrong, but consciously he makes up some excuse of why (in his case) the act is permissible, e.g. I was robbed once, so I am just getting back what was taken from me, etc. This would be a case of self-deception. Other thinkers are not at all inclined to this Socratic stance. Most famously, St. Paul in the New Testament claims that he sometimes does what he knows is wrong. There is an interesting study of akrasia by Eunice Belghum published by Garland Press.