Self-Deception and Akrasia

Abstract

We have arrived at a notion of the self as the ideal person one wants to become, the incarnation of his prudential and moral values. That one has such an ideal of self follows from the concept of a person. Since being a person entails having authority to avow one’s reasons for action, and the exercise of this authority involves appeal to prudential and moral rules in justifying a course of action, it follows that, when our actions are inconsistent with our avowed reasons and intentions, we must attribute them to an agent other than that to which the avowals are attributed, an ‘alter-ego’ which, if it could be consulted, would give different and more consistent reasons. So arises the notion of an unconscious self as the grammatical object of reflexive description, the person who actually did what I did, but not my ‘real’ self which disapproves of what was done. A split between the actual and the ideal self is necessitated in order to preserve the authority of avowals. If I cannot avow reasons consistent with my actions, then there must be, within me, some other ‘I’ that can. In brief, where the authority of self-knowledge seems to break down, it is preserved by distinguishing between two different sources of authority, the actual and the ideal self. When one identifies himself with the former, he is in self-deception. When he identifies himself with the latter, he experiences weakness of will.KeywordsUnbearable SufferingPainful KnowledgeGrammatical ObjectExternal CoercionPrudential RationalityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.