Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of Will

by Alfred R. Mele

People backslide.They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do -- a judgment developed from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to to clarify the nature of backsliding - of actions that display some weakness of will -- using traditional philosophical techniques that date back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or "akrasia" he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Mele then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because people never freely act contrarily to what they judge is best. He argues that it is extremely plausible that if people ever act freely, they sometimes backslide. At the book's heart is the development of a theoretical and empirical framework that sheds light both on backsliding and on exercises of self-control that prevent it. Here, Mele draws on work in social and developmental psychology
and in psychiatry to motivate a view of human behavior in which both backsliding and overcoming the temptation to backslide are explicable. He argues that backsliding is no illusion and our theories about the springs of action, the power of evaluative judgments, human agency, human rationality, practical reasoning, and motivation should accommodate backsliding.

Genres: Philosophy

160 pages, Hardcover

First published March 23, 2012

About the author

Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher. He has been the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University since 2000. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mele attended Wayne State University, and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1979. He took a position at Davidson College in 1979 as a visiting professor, which led to a tenured position at Davidson, where he remained for 21 years until accepting his position with Florida State.

Mele explores the concepts of autonomy or self-rule and the concept of self-control. as they relate to terms like "free will."

Without committing himself to the idea that human autonomy is compatible with determinism or incompatible (a position held by both libertarians and incompatibilists), Mele provides arguments in support of autonomous agents for both positions. He is, as he says, "officially agnostic about the truth of compatibilism" and describes his position as "agnostic autonomism."

Mele proposed a two-stage model of "Modest Libertarianism" that follows Daniel Dennett's 1978 "Valerian" model for decision making. Like Dennett, Mele requires that the indeterminism should come early in the overall process. He describes the latter - decision - part of the process as compatibilist (effectively determinist).

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

128.3 M519 2012