Non-psychological weakness of will: self-control, stereotypes, and consequences

Abstract

2010; Holton 2009). 1 Mele, then, offers a disjunctive account: weakness of will involves the violation of either kind of practical commitment. Holton, by contrast, offered a more restrictive account: weakness of will involves the violation of resolutions (a form of intention), and it is only when judgment and resolution are in agreement that judgment violations count as weakwilled.Recent experimental work by Holton and co-author Josh May has moved toward Mele's view that both forms of commitment violation are part of the folk concept. Some differences remain, however. May and Holton argue that the ordinary notion is a cluster concept rather than a disjunctive one. On their view, cases that feature both commitment violations are more central, while cases that feature one but not the other are equally marginal (May and Holton 2012). Even more recently, James Beebe has shown that the violation of either a judgment or a resolution is sufficient to generate folk ascriptions of weakness of will, which offers support for Mele's disjunctive account (2013, under review).The emerging consensus, then, is that weakness of will involves the violation of practical commitments. This view, however, has emerged out of a debate about which commitment violations are more central to the ordinary notion of weakness of will. This means that less attention has been paid to whether such violations are in fact essential to the folk concept. In order to establish that the concept essentially involves practical commitment violation, we need to establish that in cases that lack such violations, people will not make weakness of will attributions. Mele, however, does not consider this question: all of his experiments involve

What's inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-control

“…Despite the prevalence of philosophical theorizing about self-control and the importance of self-control in different Western religious traditions, there has been very little work done to understand how people attribute self-control to others. Typically, discussions of self-control attribution have investigated the conditions under which people think that a failure of selfcontrol constitutes weakness of will (Doucet & Turri, 2020;May & Holton, 2012;Mele, 2010;6 Newman et al, 2014;Rosas et al, 2018;Sousa & Mauro, 2014). In what follows, we outline several lines of evidence that indicate people are pluralists about what kinds of processes and strategies constitute self-control.…”

Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will

“…make unorthodox weakness of will attributions: they attribute weakness of will to an agent who sticks to an immoral commitment by performing an immoral action; and they attribute strength of will to an agent who breaks an immoral commitment by performing a moral action (Sousa & Mauro 2014). How can we explain this if, as Doucet and Turri's (2014) work suggests, participants do not seem to implicitly attribute a commitment to the agent?…”

“…Thus, the vignettes themselves would give participants some ground to attribute implicit commitments to the agent.) Doucet & Turri (2014) questioned this explanation. They reported evidence that the action's valence influences WWA directly, without the mediation of implicit commitment attributions.…”

What’s inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-control

“…Despite the prevalence of philosophical theorizing about self-control and its importance in different Western religious traditions, there has been very little work done to understand how people attribute self-control to others. Typically, discussions of self-control attribution have investigated the conditions under which people think that a failure of self-control constitutes weakness of will (Doucet and Turri 2014 ; May and Holton 2012 ; Mele 2010 ; Newman et al 2014 ; Rosas et al 2018 ; Sousa and Mauro 2014 ). In what follows, we sketch several lines of evidence that indicate people are pluralists about what kinds of processes and strategies constitute self-control.…”