Trusting Advice and Weakness of Will

Abstract

I want to discuss some connections between two independently interest ing philosophical problems. The first I call the problem of trusting ad vice. Just as we inquire about the grounds for trusting another person's testimony, so too might we wonder about the grounds for trusting an other person's advice. The second problem—weakness of will (or akra sia)—is more familiar. We want to know whether weakness of will is possible, and if so, what explains its occurrence. In the Protagoras, Soc rates famously defended the view that a person never deliberately does what she regards as bad; bad action is instead chalked up to practical ig norance. Most others, however, have thought it possible to knowingly act badly, and so consider weakness of will to be a genuine phenomenon.1 My goal in this paper is to argue that thinking about the problem of trusting advice affords us a third way of conceiving weakness of will, a way that otherwise remains hidden. It is too much to expect that I can show here that this third alternative is in fact superior to the two tradi tional answers. But I do hope to convince the reader that the third alter native should be taken as seriously as its rivals. There is one sort of connection between trusting advice and weakness of will, however, that I am not concerned with here. Sometimes the ad vice to <j) can get an advisee who already thinks he should <|) to actually do it. That is, sometimes advice helps an advisee avoid or overcome weak ness of will. Social psychologists may be able to tell us why this is. But I mention this connection only to set it aside. I want to focus instead on what might be called the cognitive question