Weakness of Will
You know the better course — and take the worse anyway: the ancient puzzle of acting against your own clear judgment.
Akrasia is 'weakness of will' — acting against what you yourself judge to be best, like reaching for the dessert you'd resolved to skip. Socrates (5th century BCE), as Plato portrays him in the Protagoras, provocatively denied it was even possible: no one, he argued, knowingly does wrong, so what looks like weakness is really ignorance. Aristotle (4th century BCE) took the puzzle more seriously in Nicomachean Ethics VII, explaining how passion can override knowledge that is 'present but not active.' The problem has occupied moral philosophers ever since.
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Key passages(20)
In Ethica Nicomachea Paraphrasis (Pseudepigraphum Olim A Constantino Palaeocappa confectum et olim sub auctore Heliodoro Prusensi vel Andronico Rhodio vel Olympiodoro) · Anonymi In Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea