AKRASIA AND EDUCATION:
A RESPONSE TO DEBORAH KERDEMAN

Shirley Pendlebury
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Can the teaching of ethics help to cleanse the business world of shady dealings? No, says Deborah Kerdeman, not if we take Aristotle seriously. For without the right kind of habituation, knowledge is insufficient for right action. A person may know what is right, yet still do what is wrong.

With clarity, economy, and due attention to some of the difficulties of interpretation, Deborah Kerdeman presents Aristotle’s account of akrasia and shows how it might inform our understanding of the tasks and constraints of moral education. I have no quarrel with the substance of her arguments or with her view that Burnyeat’s developmental account of akrasia is more illuminating, and truer to the spirit of Aristotle, than Irwin’s analysis, which takes akratic action to be a triumph of feeling and appetite over reason and, by implication, denies the importance of feeling in the realization of virtuous conduct. However, to defend these views would take me too far into scholarly debate than is either appropriate or possible within the scope of a brief response. Instead I shall list some questionable assumptions about akrasia and the task of moral education in our times.

Kerdeman herself begins the list in the final section of her paper, where she mentions two features of Aristotle’s account which give her pause: First, the assumption that the affects of environment are cumulative and irreversible; and, second, the assumption that some ends are undeniably good. My list includes the second of these, some matters related to it, and some apparent features of Kerdeman’s position which give me pause. I begin with the latter.

First, it is a mistake to assume that akrasia is only or primarily a moral problem. A man acting against his own best judgment does not always act immorally. If his best judgment is not in the interests of the good, then his akratic action may in a sense be more moral than an action consistent with his best judgment. Amelie Rorty gives the example of the Mafioso who, against his own better judgment, just cannot bring himself to shoot the Godfather’s competitor.¹ She reminds us that in the wake of Freud, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche we can no longer take for granted the view that agents are essentially motivated by a conception of what is good.

Second, it is a mistake to assume that the only or primary task of moral education is to address the problem of akrasia. I do not think that Kerdeman makes this mistake. What she claims, following Aristotle, is that the phenomenon of akrasia presents a special challenge to moral education. Certainly it presents a challenge, but in what sense is it supposed to be special? Newsweek’s conclusion supplies a clue: “Knowing what’s right is easy. It’s doing what’s right that’s hard.” Presumably the special challenge for educators is to get people to do what’s right and not simply to know what’s right. But, as Kerdeman herself points out in her concluding paragraph, knowing what’s right isn’t easy, especially in a pluralistic society. She thus suggests that a central task for moral education today is to “engage everyone involved in defining just what ‘the good’ means.”

Third, it is a mistake to assume, as Kerdeman appears to, that pluralism is the main reason why it is not easy to know what is right. To make my point I return to Aristotle’s analysis. Aristotle says that akrasia is a form of practical judgment gone wrong. Practical judgment can go wrong in several ways, not all akratic and any of which could lead us to act wrongly. For instance, we may do the wrong thing because we are insufficiently attuned to the fine details of a situation or because we do not always properly know what we are doing. While habituation of the right kind may be crucial in developing those virtues of character which are the mainstay of right action, right action also requires a proper judgment of the situation and of the conflicting concerns that have bearing on it. Or to put it differently, right action calls for both the virtues of character and the virtues of intellect. The chief virtue of intellect, on Aristotle’s view, is practical wisdom.

One of the marks of practical wisdom is aisthesis or what David Wiggins calls ‘situational appreciation’, that is, an attunement to the particulars of the situations which call us to action.² This is not simply a matter of careful and objective attention to detail for the relevant features of a situation ‘may not always jump to the eye’. Situational appreciation is crucially a matter of interpretation and one which often depends upon imagination, appropriate emotion and moral insight. Without these we may not see what, in this situation, is the right thing to do. In short, knowing what is right in general does not always help us to see what is right in a particular situation — and this is so regardless of whether or not we are members of a pluralistic society. If situational appreciation is crucial for seeing what’s right in particular situations, then there is an additional task for moral education and that is the development of imagination and insight.

This brings me to the fourth and final item on my list. In her closing sentences Kerdeman suggests that moral education in a pluralistic world “is a far more complex enterprise than Aristotle might have imagined”. I would add that akrasia is a far more complex phenomenon than might be assumed by someone who took Aristotle’s account as the last word on the matter.

Consider, briefly, two features of akrasia which raise important educational questions as well as questions about standard views about human agency and rationality. One is that there is no single source of akrasia; the other is that the psychological strategies which attract us to the akratic alternative are what Amelie Rorty calls ‘standard operating procedures’.³

Kerdeman argues, correctly, that knowing what’s right is an insufficient condition for doing what’s right. Or, to put the matter more broadly, that judging what is in our own best interests (however these are conceived) is insufficient for acting accordingly. An important educational question, then, is how far and in what ways akrasia can be tackled at its source. We act against our own best judgments for many reasons, for instance: because of poor habits of action, mismatched with our desires or aspirations; because of a lack of the perceptual and imaginative habits required for seeing the preferred goods vividly (or for seeing, in concrete detail, the ways in which and the extent to which the akratic alternative might be damaging); because of a lack of subjective conviction in our own strength or in our own future. All these are instances of how powerlessness, in various forms, tends to akrasia. But, as Amelie Rorty points out, unrestricted or unusual power can have a similar tendency.⁴ Where power is unrestricted, the normal checks and balances which may serve on the side of right action are absent. These observations are pertinent to the problem of shady dealings in business. I am more interested, here, in the broader educational challenges of akrasia. My sketchy, incomplete list of akratic sources suggests an educational agenda which would give primacy to developing both fruitful habits of action and imaginative and perceptual capacities. This is a task for education as a whole, not a task for a short course in applied ethics.

But there is also a risk in attempting to prevent or overcome akrasia. If it is true that the strategies which attract us to akrasia are standard operating procedures, then attempts to eradicate akrasia could jeopardize these procedures. What are the strategies that attract us to akratic action? Rorty mentions three: (a) Sometimes the akratic alternative magnetizes us, dominating our attention; (b) sometimes the akratic alternative attracts because it is ‘the familiar, the habitual, the easy course’; (c) and sometimes ‘social streaming can pull in the direction of the akratic alternative’.⁵ But all three of these strategies could, under different conditions, serve the interests of our better judgments.

In this response I have listed some mistaken assumptions about akrasia and moral education. In addition I have sketched some of the broader educational implications of recent accounts of akrasia. My purpose, in part, has been to challenge Deborah Kerdeman, who appears to make some of these mistaken assumptions. It has also been to support her implicit claim that akrasia is an important educational problem, although not one which is restricted to the domain of moral education.

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¹ Amelie Rorty, “Akrasia and Conflict,” in The Wayward Min (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 247.

² David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reasoning,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 221-240.

³ Rorty, “Akrasia and Conflict,” 262.

⁴ Ibid., 260.

⁵ Ibid., 261.