Transcript: Episode 130 with Jessica Tizzard on weakness of the will

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Thanks to Maria Araújo for another excellent transcription! Episode post here.

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Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman.

Long Dang:
And I’m Long.

Matt Teichman:
With us today is Jessica Tizzard, Assistant Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. And she is here to discuss weakness of the will. Jessica Tizzard, welcome.

Jessica Tizzard:
Thank you for having me.

Matt Teichman:
So, weakness of the will is a classic philosophical topic/puzzle that’s really fun to think about. And I would say it corresponds, more or less, to what we talk about in everyday contexts, as: this is a situation where I need to have a lot of willpower. I have to be strong-willed in this situation and try to do the right thing.

One simple example of that might be when I’m thinking about: do I want to go to a party tonight? On the one hand, it would be a lot of fun, and I’d get to hang out with my friends—maybe even engage in some libations. But, you know, I have a big job interview coming up tomorrow morning. Or I have a big exam coming up tomorrow morning. And, in some sense, it would be irresponsible for me to go to this party tonight. I’m kind of, like, ‘no, I shouldn’t’—but I do it anyway. So we talk about that as a lack of willpower. Is that a good way to think of the phenomenon of weakness of the will? These situations where you need a lot of willpower, but then it doesn’t work out—you know that X is the right thing to do, but instead you do Y?

Jessica Tizzard:
Right, yeah. I think that is a good way to think about it. I should say up front that, as a philosopher, my work is mainly on the philosopher Immanuel Kant. So, when I’m thinking about weakness of will in my job as a philosopher, I’m thinking about how to properly interpret Kant’s understanding of what weakness of will is. And when he introduces the phenomenon, he quotes St. Paul in Romans as saying: ‘what I would do, that I do not do’. So that is the basic idea: I want to do something; I think there’s a principled reason to do that; I view that thing as the right thing to do; and yet, I do not do it. And I think, as you said, that seems to capture our everyday sense of weakness of will, when we talk about it.

Matt Teichman:
What about cases involving bravery, or overcoming your fear? So, maybe I’m on the street, and I see someone attacking somebody else; and I know that what I should do is defend them, but I’m scared, I’m scared I’m going to get hurt. So, this is some sort of moment of truth for me—where doing the courageous thing would be overcoming my fear, and defending the person who’s getting attacked. And let’s say that I don’t do that. Let’s say that I chicken out, and I don’t help the person, and I’m really ashamed of it afterwards. Is that also a case of weakness of the will?

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah, I think it makes sense to think of it as yet another case of weakness of the will. And I like that you used the term afterwards: ‘I was ashamed afterwards’. I think on Kant’s view—and I think this should be our general view—it’s a much broader phenomenon than the really puzzling type of case where, even in the moment, I know that I’m doing something wrong, in acting as I do. I think we can apply the term weakness to any case where I act against my established moral commitments or principles, and then come to regret my action, once I have reflective clarity on the fact that I did act against those principles. It could be that that reflective clarity doesn’t come until later.

So maybe, in the example you’re talking about now, I think I am not obligated to intervene in this situation, right? I’m not acting badly in failing to help this person. But then, later, I’ll realize I made that judgment on the basis of my fear, and that it wasn’t a good reason to make that judgment. I had no real ground to think; I was just motivated by my fear. And so, I exhibited weakness there. So, once I achieve clarity, I’ll regret what I did, and see that it was weak—as you said.

Matt Teichman:
Is there any kind of statute of limitations on this? Like, what about regretting a major life decision from twenty-five years ago, like, ‘You know, I should’ve gone to law school, and I would have been a great lawyer—etc. etc.—but I didn’t do that. And now I’m kicking myself’. So, would any case involving major regrets, even over a long period, also maybe fall under this category?

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah, I haven’t been asked that question before. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that there needs to be some kind of temporal limit. I would say that it’s important for Kant to think of this as a moral phenomenon. So, weakness doesn’t extend to prudential failures, where I think: ‘I would have been happier if I had gone to law school, because I would have made more money; or I would’ve had a more stable job; or it would have made it easier…‘, you know? So, if those are the kinds of considerations that factor into my happiness—‘Am I able to meet the desires that I have?‘— that’s not an example of the kind of weakness that he’s talking about, and that I work on, and that we’re here to talk about today. So, I think it’s important to recognize that for Kant it is a moral phenomenon. Even if it doesn’t have temporal limits, it does have some kind of limit.

Matt Teichman:
Okay, yeah, that’s a nice point. So maybe a better example of this would be like: ‘I regret years and years and years ago, when I was engaged—I should have been nicer to my fiancée’, or something like that.

Jessica Tizzard:
Right, yeah. Where that’s understood as: ‘I should have been nicer to her. Not because it would have made her happier, but because I owed her that—insofar as she’s another moral being’. Right.

Long Dang:
Just wondering: where do the moral principles that Kant is talking about come from? It seems like, in the bravery example, you may aspire to be the brave person—and you take as what you should be doing being brave and helping this person—but you fail to do so. So, is the principle there coming from society, or is it within a broader Kantian moral framework that we have to think about those principles?

Jessica Tizzard:
Oh, right. So, is the question: can some of these principles be dictated by society, in a way that could vary from one society to another?

Long Dang:
Yeah.

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah, so I think there is room for that, on Kant. And maybe one good distinction to introduce now—that’s related to the phenomenon of weakness, and also has general application beyond Kant scholarship—is: he distinguishes between what he calls perfect duties and imperfect duties. Perfect duties are things like: not to kill, not to steal. Here, there are no exceptions. And so, on his view, there is no room for latitude across cultures or societies. If something can be defined as killing, it’s wrong. But then, with imperfect duties, they’re general ends that we’re supposed to have. Things like: being good to my parents, or being munificent to others, taking the happiness of others into account, developing my talents—things like this.

And so, it’s unclear exactly how to do those things, right? He calls them wide duties, in the sense that they don’t specify particular actions that we’re supposed to do. In the sphere of these kinds of duties—first, there can be differences across cultures, because there’s no exact blueprint on how to discharge these duties, or fulfill them. But then also, I think, this is where weakness can creep in, because it’s often unclear to us how exactly to go about fulfilling these duties—especially in difficult situations, where it might seem as though two imperfect duties are conflicting with one another. And it’s in not knowing how to navigate these difficult waters that human weakness can arise.

So I think courage is a good example because—insofar as it’s up to you to intervene, and perhaps save the life of another person—it can be unclear. ‘Is it up to me to do this?’ I think it’s possible that different societies might understand the obligation that I’m under in that case differently—because we’re talking about imperfect, or wide duties.

Matt Teichman:
So, would it be fair to say that a perfect duty is just a hard no—like, don’t ever kill anybody—it doesn’t even matter what the situation is. Whereas an imperfect duty—maybe what we want to say is that there’s context to take into account, and particulars of the context can affect what exactly the duty is, or something like that.

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to look at it. It’s much more context-dependent. There are just a lot more factors to consider in deciding what to do, with respect to a given duty. And, like I said, conflicts can arise, right? This is what makes context important: what kind of other duties are in play here? What else do I have to think about; what other obligations are weighing on me, and how do I prioritize them? This is a big, important question. Whereas, yes—with perfect duties, there is no context in which my duty not to kill could be lifted because of some other duty that I have.

Long Dang:
So with the example of someone who thinks to herself that she should be doing her homework, but goes out to a party instead—is that a failure to take into account these contextual elements? I’m just wondering, in that case, what goes wrong in the law?

Jessica Tizzard:
Right. Yeah, I think the party case is a really good example to think about. And for Kant, I think, we don’t even need to necessarily specify the added condition—that I have something to do tomorrow that’s important, and I should be thinking about that. I think, for Kant, we can see duties conflicting—moral duties conflicting—in just the idea of going to a big party, because he thinks there’s two things at work here.

So, I should say that Kant, historically as a person, loved parties and thought they were extremely important. He gets a bad rap—people think he was this really boring guy who never did anything, and sort of lived his life in this regimented order and did the same thing at the same time every day. But it’s very true that he loved parties—he thought they were super important. And he thinks that there’s a moral dimension to them.

The kind of company that I enjoy in a party—coming together with lots of different people, and being able to converse freely, over many hours, in a relaxed situation—is a moral good, for him. He thinks we have a wide duty to pursue these kinds of situations. But then, he also worries that parties are an invitation to excess, right? So, he imagines being invited to a large banquet, and knowing that there’s going to be a lot of food and drink there—rich food and copious amounts of alcohol. And the question is: how do I navigate these two things? For him, there’s room for genuinely not knowing what the right answer is.

I’ll just say, as one last aside—when he introduces these kinds of examples in The Metaphysics of Morals, which is one of his major ethical works, he asks what he calls casuistical questions. So, on our topic, he says (for once, I’m quoting here): ‘Can one at least justify, if not eulogize, a use of wine bordering on intoxication, since it enlivens the company’s conversation, and in so doing makes them speak more freely?’ I think he’s asking this as a genuine question. The thought is: can I use imbibing as a means to this moral end of socializing, or am I transgressing against a duty to myself to be temperate and not misuse my capacity for eating and drinking in a way that is harmful to me? Where is the limit on this kind of case? I think it’s not knowing that leads to problems.

Matt Teichman:
So intuitively, to me, this version of the situation that we’re imagining sounds a bit more like a dilemma than a case of being weak-willed. Because you have these two competing considerations, and you can’t choose between them. The way I usually think of a case of weakness of the will is: you did choose A rather than B, and yet you did B instead. So I was just curious about whether this is indicative of an approach that you think we should take to weakness of the will. Should we think of it on the lines of a moral dilemma?

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah. In talking about the traditional case of weakness of will, a big part of what takes center stage is what philosophers would call the phenomenology of the experience. So, it’s how it feels to me—it’s this thought that I’m in a lot of pain because I recognize that there’s a real tension here, right? I think that I should do something; maybe I think I shouldn’t go to the party, but then I go anyway. I think Kant is trying to understand: how is it possible for this puzzle to manifest itself to us? He’s not thinking so much about what it feels like, in certain cases. And so, the kind of framework I set up with the party case, where there’s two conflicting imperfect duties—I think this is an important part of the framework that maybe has to be in play, for it to be identifiable as a case where moral weakness is going to apply, for Kant.

But then, there’s various ways for this framework to play itself out for the agent. And so I think there is room for one way of realizing this framework to be, in the traditional case, with the phenomenology—or the feels like—of, ‘Right, I’m torn and I’m pained at being torn’. So, we could imagine, the person is dealing with these conflicting duties, but she just feels a strong desire to go to the party. And she does. And she gets swept up in things, overindulging, enjoying the company, you know, just doing what people do at parties. And all the while, at the back of her mind, there’s this thought: ‘I’m doing something wrong’. So there is room for that kind of case. But I like calling it a dilemma, because I think that’s important.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. I think the phenomenon of feeling torn—and maybe not just feeling torn, but actually being torn, as in: it’s just not clear what the right thing to do is—is probably common to all the examples we discussed. So there is a strong reason for you to help the other person who’s being attacked: namely, that person doesn’t deserve to get attacked. And there’s also a strong reason for you not to: namely, you don’t want to get hurt. So, yeah, this ‘being pulled in two directions’ thing seems to be common across all the cases we’ve discussed.

Jessica Tizzard:
I like that way of thinking about it, and I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves of that. Because if you read a lot of philosophy papers on weakness of will, sometimes they’ll just talk about a case where, you know, I have an extra piece of chocolate cake. And having that piece of cake is just painted as obviously something that I shouldn’t be doing—that doesn’t have any appeal to me beyond the animal instinct to gorge myself on something sweet. We’re supposed to think: I have no real reason to want to do that. It kind of sucks the dilemma out of the situation; I think it is important to think of weakness as coming from a robust dilemma between conflicting principles, or duties.

Matt Teichman:
I also wonder, sometimes, whether philosophers really should be in the business of micromanaging our every little eating decision.

Jessica Tizzard:
Yes, that’s true. Yes, I do think we can take it to extremes.

Long Dang:
So, I was just wondering: it seems like in the case of someone having a weakness of the will, part of it is having these conflicting principles, or desires, being at play at the same time. What’s the role of trying to gain as much experience dealing with the contextual background, as much as possible? Is it the case that the more experience we have, with having this dilemma—of, on the one hand, wanting to go to the party and, on the other, wanting to stay at home and study for exams—would just having that experience repeatedly help one to somehow resolve the situation, in one way or the other?

Jessica Tizzard:
Right—I think it’s an under-explored part of Kant’s philosophy—that he thinks having general moral principles is not quite enough. I need, also, to have what he calls a ‘cultivated sense of judgment’. I need to be better at reading the situation; I need to have more experience in being able to—in wanting to go to the party, I’m not thinking about just my duty to socialize, right? I’m not just thinking about the fact that there’s a real moral end in going to spend time with other people. I might really just be motivated to ignore my problems, by going out and distracting myself, and drinking too much, or something like that.

So it’s knowing yourself, and knowing what tempts you, and being able to differentiate between genuine questions about what’s the right thing to do, and rationalizations—where I’m really just masquerading something as the right thing to do, while I’m just trying to do something self-interested, something that’s only thinking about satisfying various desires. I think this is the kind of experience that Kant thinks it takes to cultivate good judgment and stand a chance at avoiding weakness.

Long Dang:
Right. I was just wondering if there is the possibility of rationalizing by adding in more reasons why you should go to the party, and not study for exams—while, from an outside perspective, it might seem clear that what you should be doing is, instead, staying at home and studying for exams, because that’s important for your future.

Jessica Tizzard:
Right, yeah. I think that is a thing to worry about, and a thing that cultivating judgment and experience helps me avoid. I like the way you put it in terms of the outside perspective. Someone else’s perspective would see that you’re just manufacturing reasons where there are none—you know, good reasons to act, reasons that aren’t just about me being able to satisfy various desires that I have, that don’t hold up to objective or moral scrutiny. I think that is the right way to think about what’s going on in cases like this.

He identifies three different ‘levels’ of moral failure, and weakness is the least severe. And for him, the weak person is someone who genuinely is trying to do the right thing. And they do have a good general framework for what it means to act well—what kinds of things should I be aiming for, in living a moral life? And so, I think that rationalizing is possible for such a person, for sure.

Like I said, Kant has a broad, expanded notion of weakness. It’s not just the case where I know I’m doing the wrong thing, and so I can’t rationalize. It could also include cases like this. But it’s important that we don’t view such cases as instances of bad faith: where I’m going through these ratiocinations, so that I can justify to myself going to the party. It’s not that backhanded, and it’s not that deceptive. You know, I’m genuinely trying. And this seems to me like a reason now, because I want to go to the party so badly. But later, I’ll realize that it wasn’t one. It won’t hold up to further scrutiny, and I’ll see that I was acting out of weakness.

Matt Teichman:
Isn’t it an indication that the weak-willed person grasps the relevant moral rules and facts, that they feel guilty when this happens?

Jessica Tizzard:
Right.

Matt Teichman:
As opposed to just being a moustache-twirling villain.

Jessica Tizzard:
Right, exactly. Yeah, they do. That’s a wonderful way to put the point. I do feel guilt when I realize my failure. I think that’s the important characteristic identified in the classic example. I feel pain in the moment, because I realize that there’s something wrong—and this pain reveals my moral interest in being good. Kant is pretty committed to the fact that we can feel that feeling at lots of different levels of evil. And that’s what reveals the fact that we’re moral beings. It’s not that we do the right thing all the time—it’s that we feel bad when we don’t. That’s what reveals our interest in the good.

Matt Teichman:
One thing you often hear people say about these cases is: ‘Yeah, yeah, I knew what to do, but I was overcome with desire. The desire swamped me, and made me do the wrong thing’—or something like that. You know, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the party but, dammit, the pleasure instinct took over, and I didn’t listen to the inner voice in my head telling me what I really was supposed to do’. Do you think that’s a helpful way to understand these cases?

Jessica Tizzard:
I’m glad you brought that up, because there are even people who attribute that view to Kant—it obviously sounds very different from the kind of view I’ve been attributing to him. If that’s the basic kind of case—if we want to self-explain, or self-interpret our action in this way—I think there’s two philosophical accounts that one could give to unpack it. One is to say: ‘Yeah, that is just what happened. I was overpowered by desire. So, no matter how strong my reasons might be, no matter how robust my moral knowledge is, I’m just the type of creature who can always be overpowered by stronger affective desires that come to me through my capacity to sense and stand in desirous relations to the world’.

And then, the other way to think about it would be: ‘Well, I say that, and it makes sense for me to say that—but all that really reveals is that I am deceiving myself. And in fact, my basic general moral commitments, or principles, are to do the thing that I profess to not want to do’. So this way of interpreting humans would insist that I am not the kind of creature who can just be overtaken by instinct, or strong desire. As a rational, moral being, everything that I do is determined by reasons that I have—by principles that I adopt. And so, it just cannot be that I’m overcome. Really, I’m just lying to myself, and in fact, I have the opposite principle. That’s saying, you know, it is okay to throw over other obligations for the pursuit of pleasure; or, it is okay to put my own well-being before other people, and be a ‘coward’ in certain situations.

So these are the two interpretive options we have. And I don’t think that they are helpful ways to think about what goes on when we act weakly. I think, as a Kant scholar, that’s absolutely not Kant’s view. But even just as a human being, trying to make sense of weakness—because we’re all weak—I don’t know how many everyday people would want to give that kind of explanation of weakness. I think it’s something that philosophers end up saying, because other things that they want to accept philosophically constrain them. They back them into a corner, and they have to say something like that. But I want to deny that we have to end up in that corner. We can still have a really robust conception of reason and the way that our capacity to form principles (and act according to them, and exhibit good practical judgment) influences our lives (and directs our lives as rational beings) without going into that corner.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like one issue with going that route is that what I end up saying about the party is: ‘Well, no, if I decided to go to the party, then, at the end of the day, I thought everything weighed in favor of going to the party. So, that’s just what I decided.’ Which is great—what that buys us is it makes sense. But then what we lose is: it doesn’t look like weak-willed behavior anymore, it just looks like an ordinary ‘I decided to go to the party’ case.

Jessica Tizzard:
Right. Yeah, exactly. And then it can be impossible to explain—Well, not impossible, but we end up having to give a strange, convoluted explanation of ‘Why do I feel pain about it then?’

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. Exactly.

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah. In what sense am I regretting something—or, what’s going on there? Yeah, I think that’s a hard hole to dig yourself out of. And then, in the second case, where I admit I am just overcome by strong desire—I don’t want to say that we should deny that strong desires can surprise us, and influence us, and exert their pressure on us, and influence our behavior as human beings. I think it would be philosophically strange to deny that. But in trying to explain how weakness of will is possible—or what it looks like, in general—I think that we end our work too early in just focusing on the desire. In saying: it, there, that’s what overwhelmed me.

I think it’s much more important to think about my capacity for judgment, and my understanding, and what might’ve been lacking there—such that, in being confronted with the strong desire, I ended up doing the bad thing. I ended up acting against my established principles in a way that I came to regret, and that causes me some pain. So I guess one way of thinking of it is: if we’re trying to avoid weakness, the thing to do isn’t to try to avoid having strong desires— that’s just never going to happen, right? That’s just the kinds of creatures that we are, that this is always going to be something that we’re at risk for having. The thing to work on is my capacity for judgment and understanding. So I would deny that the two things can be totally disconnected. They definitely influence one another.

Long Dang:
So we’ve been talking about how these two readings of the phenomenon of weakness of the will are unintuitive about the ways we would normally go about having these dilemmas. I was just wondering what your view about the situation is—what’s a more accurate way that we could describe the phenomenon?

Jessica Tizzard:
Yeah. So, there’s a sense in which we’ve been talking about it all along. So, I would say that the most important thing in explaining weakness—for me, and I think for Kant—is thinking about where imperfect duties collide, and thinking about this sort of dilemma we’ve been talking about, and cultivating the sense of judgment that will allow us to best navigate the application of these principles.

This is very different from the other two views. Because if you think about what I called the ‘rationalist view’—they’re not thinking about the application of principles, they’re just thinking about the principles themselves. So, ‘Do I have good ones or bad ones? Am I actually committed to being temperate? Am I actually committed to caring about other people, and helping them when they’re in need? Or am I self-deceived about that?’ My view is saying, ‘No—as a weak person, I still have a good will, I am still committed to these things. I just fail to bear them out sometimes. And that’s because I have an imperfect understanding—or an uncultivated judgment—about how best to apply these principles to particular situations.’ So that’s how I think we need to respond to the rationalist view.

And then there’s the second view, which says, ‘I’m just overcome by strong desire.’ I think that’s, probably, to a lot of people, the intuitive way to explain weakness. But for someone who is going to emphasize (but not overemphasize) our capacity to reason, and the difference that it makes in our lives as moral creatures—I don’t think there’s room for thinking about the interaction between reason and desire in that way.

So we don’t want to deny that we do experience strong desires. But insofar as we’re thinking about the moral relevance of those desires—it can’t be that it just takes me over, and determines me, because then I lose all autonomy. It no longer seems to be a morally relevant action; I’m just, sort of, carried off. We don’t want to think about it that way, insofar as we’re thinking about the moral context.

The way Kant thinks about it is: what makes these desires strong and difficult for me to grapple with is not their sheer psychological or mechanical force, but the way they figure in my particular moral, rational framework. Right? They’re difficult desires for me to reflect upon. We can understand there to be things that are generally difficult for all humans to reflect upon, because of our basic needs for self preservation, and to be loved, and to be happy. But then, there can also be specific desires that are difficult for me, as an individual, to reflect upon—given other ends I have, given my personal history, and things like that. But, in general, the idea is going to be against the ‘strong desire’ view. I do have strong desires. But to understand why I might act on them anyway, I have to think about my capacities for reflection and judgment—maybe, in some cases, my personal experience—in order to understand how they influence my life, and how they lead me to apply the moral principles—that I’m trying to apply in shaping my life—in a bad way.

Matt Teichman:
So in other words, it isn’t that desire is this alien force seizing control of you, and manipulating you like a marionette. Rather, a desire is maybe just a consideration that’s challenging to think about and get right.

Jessica Tizzard:
Oh, yes, I really like that way of thinking about it. Yeah. A desire—it has a certain kind of efficacy, or urgency. It presents something as ‘to be done’. And then it’s up to me to apply my judgment, and think about whether that thing should be done. So, yeah—as you said, it’s very much within the economy of reasons.

Long Dang:
So, in terms of thinking about a prescriptive way to handle a dilemma like this—what do you think should be the way that we go about doing so?

Jessica Tizzard:
Right. I think that’s a good question that helps bring us down to earth—because we’ve been talking about some pretty highly theoretical ways of thinking about weakness. The prescriptive element is going to be really different depending on how you want to think about it. So if you’re a rationalist, it’s really just a matter of introspecting, and trying to clear away the clouds of self-deception, and figuring out what my principles really, really are. And this is actually something that Kant thinks is very difficult (if not impossible) to do. And I think he would worry—and a lot of us would worry—that there’s just too much navel gazing going on there, and it’s not going to help me be a better person.

And then, on the other hand, the extreme view—I mean, you’ve accepted that there’s no connection between my reasons and my desires, right? So, I can gain however much moral knowledge I want, I can really think about things—but it’s never going to make a difference. If I just have that strong desire, I’ll have that strong desire. And so, managing that desire is not going to be a moral enterprise; it’s not going to have anything to do with education, with reflection. I don’t know that there is a real prescription for how to live one’s life to come out of that view.

On my view, there is work to be done—but it needs to be mainly outward-looking. It needs to be me trying to size up the situation earnestly, and thinking about, maybe, past experiences. Thinking about: what kind of weaknesses am I generally susceptible to? How is this situation like another one I encountered in the past, and then I ended up regretting the way I acted? It’s cultivating judgment in that sense, because it takes for granted that I am trying to do the right thing. I do have the right principles, and it’s just a matter of implementing them properly—of reading the particular situation that I’m in, properly, relative to those principles.

Matt Teichman:
Jessica Tizzard, thanks so much for joining us. And let me just say that I’m particularly pleased that we settled, once and for all, that Kant liked to get down and boogie.

Jessica Tizzard:
Yes, he certainly did! Thank you.

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