Wrapping up Aristotle: On the Emotions and Akrasia

The Problem of Akrasia

We’ve been discussing Aristotle’s take on lack of self control, explaining that there were two types: weakness of will and impulsiveness. I discussed how these two types of character led to a deeper understanding of the emotions. Now we want to take this knowledge and see if we can use this knowledge to work towards our goals of showing that good and bad are more than just relativistic, arbitrary concepts, and that ethics has a real job to do.

The ancient Greeks had a term for being unable to control yourself, for going against your better judgment: akrasia. I’ve discussed this earlier, but I’ll restate it here without making an obvious argument, as a sort of signpost to where we are going: judgement should not be thought of only in terms of the sort of thinking you do when doing algebra problems. Judgement of a kind is going on all the time inside you, even if you aren’t aware of it.

With that said, lets put it aside for a moment and focus on finishing up with Aristotle.

Akrasia is a very important concept in ethics for the simple reason that it’s hard to explain why it should happen. If we know what’s right and wrong, if we can think and understand that we should or should not do a particular thing, why then do we still sometimes do bad things? If you have an ethical theory that insists morality and moral behavior are at least sometimes products of human cognitive ability, that is if you believe that you use your brain to consider right and wrong, good and bad, you’d better have a good explanation for why thinking people don’t do what they know is good all the time. Otherwise it might be easier to think that what we think has nothing much to do with what we do.

You and I both know we do not do what is good all the time, so we need an explanation. And it can’t be some sort of self-serving or question-begging claim everyone knows is wrong but that will “save” your theory from being obviously weak. A good theory will account for such problems legitimately, or you might say ‘organically’ in that it ‘grows’ out of’ the structure.

So in this installment we’re going to see how the innovations we saw last time from Aristotle will help solve the problem of akrasia. More specifically, we want to uncover if and to what extent emotions contribute to or explain akrasia. We’re asking Aristotle to tell us whether emotionally excited people who do bad things are acting voluntarily, involuntarily, or some mix of the two.

Well, first off Aristotle notes that common sense and experience tell us sometimes people really do deliberate and fail to stick to the results of the deliberation because of their emotional condition. (Later down the road we’ll discuss the ‘how’). Second, he notes that sometimes people see this possibility coming and ‘wake’ themselves, regaining control of themselves before it is too late and they get overcome. Because both of these things are true, common sense tells us that some things done through the emotions are not done knowingly and so they are involuntary. Let’s think of a couple of examples.

Consider the difference between an enraged soldier in battle and an wealthy executive being insulted by his spouse or lover at a country club cocktail party. You might argue that the soldier’s and the executive’s responses are “voluntary”, but they have important differences.

Emotions and Akrasia

The ethical issue is that some emotions are inevitably, strongly going to be experienced given a certain context. So we need to understand how reasonable it is to expect a moderation of the emotion or at the least keeping a good handle on behavior in such situations is. In some cases emotional action will violate one of the three standards for an act being voluntary (not in ignorance of relevant factors, unforced, the result of deliberation), and so in those cases, the action should be considered counter voluntary. After all, how could a soldier expect to survive if he isn’t reacting to the seriousness of a life and death struggle? Similarly, how could the businessman keep his reputation if he responds inappropriately to his wife? If he hits her he’s obviously gone beyond acceptable behavior, but if he is made to look ineffectual he’s in bad shape too.

Whatever sort of thinking and judging is going on in cases where you are overcome by emotion, it sure seems to common sense to be “less” than the sort of conscious deliberation you might go through as you’re diligently crafting your cover letter for a new job application, the sort of thing I’ve called the conscious deliberation of a reasoning agent.

So to that extent you might be inclined to say that motional actions sometimes do not involve planning ahead and accepting the consequences of your possible actions. In some cases at least, the spirit of calling something “voluntary” is violated even if the term somewhat loosely applies. But how do we distinguish those cases?

Aristotle and Plato both say that behaving uncontrolled with respect to the emotions is actually in a way giving in to reason – it is “intelligent” behavior, even if inappropriate or just plain wrong. The idea is that temper is rational in that it is open to the dictates of reason in a way the appetites aren’t: cognition is going on even if reflection isn’t.

As Aristotle puts it, temper relative to reason is like a hasty servant to its master, or a dog barking at someone approaching the home. The hasty servant runs out of the room before hearing everything said and then fails to carry out the instruction. And the dog is on alert even before it knows whether the visitor is a friend. Both reason and sensory appearance can cause an emotion and temper is not only a quality of the act, it is a source of it, it’s a feeling and a mental event.

Thinking back to the anger situations of the soldier and the businessman, in such circumstances either reason or appearance (or both) will indicate something like “unprovoked aggression” or “insult” and temper, as if having reasoned out this sort of thing is a good cause for “going to war”, moves immediately into hostile mode. So this “incomplete thinking” is in a way temper following reason.

On the other hand, in a case of too much appetite, (the ‘kid in the candy store’), all appetite needs is for perception to say “pleasant” and you hatch a plan to get enjoyment even though you just ate. While appetite drives you immediately to seek gratification for the sake of gratification, a person who loses their temper, while open to reason, doesn’t always exactly “plot” the satisfaction of temper. It’s in the service of reason, misunderstood.

Aristotle’s Answers

The “separation” we see in a weak person’s action is often missing in the behavior of the intemperate one. While the intemperate person is wholly in the moment, the weak one is fully aware and methodical in their choice. When you get down to it, what Aristotle says about the emotions is that some emotions really are counter-voluntary. This means that his ethical theory and others like it has good reason to assume that some emotional acts are counter-voluntary. Therefore there’s a big moral difference in doing something wrong based on an emotion that is fundamentally counter-voluntary. And as we’ve noted, in some cases its just going to be the case you will experience a counter voluntary emotion.

Now if you act from an anger of such violence that you “see red”, you don’t know what you are doing. And if you are incapable of knowing what you are doing, but later regret what you did, then clearly you acted counter-voluntarily. (If you didn’t regret it, then it sure seems like the outcome matches what you would have willed.) What can we do with that?

Aristotle defines the emotions as “all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgment and that are also attended by pain or pleasure”. This cognitive (thinking-centered) definition allows a three-step process by which to examine emotions and understand their impact. And it should give us some insight into how we can develop a strong understanding of right and wrong. He asks us to ask:

1. What is the state of mind of the (e.g., Angry) person?
2. Who do we usually get (angry) with?
3. On what grounds do we get (angry) with them?

Answering these questions gives Aristotle this definition of anger: an “impulse accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself and one’s friends.” But how does it help us understand right and wrong?

First, thinking seriously about people you are dealing with or observing in this manner will train you to be a better judge of character, temperament, motive and tendencies. Second, I believe it tells us that what’s notable about the emotions is how powerful their felt experience is bound to be on certain occasions, and how this is still intimately tied to our cognitive abilities. Third, it helps us understand that akrasia, which might on the surface look like people choosing to do what they know will hurt them, is at least in the cases of certain emotions, not that at all. In the case of being enraged it’s a quick solution to what appears to be a life and death threat – whether, as in the case of the soldier the potential for physical death, or in the case of the businessman, the potential for social or societal “death”.

It is up to those of us who really care about right and wrong to fairly understand what type of person we are dealing with, what type of context they are in, and what the likelihood is that their emotional response is controllable before we determine whether they acted good or bad, and how to punish them if necessary.

There’s still a lot more to be said on right and wrong, but for now we’re done with Aristotle. Next time we’ll begin on Lucretius’ discussion of mind, which develops what Plato and Aristotle started in a highly scientific manner and will allow us some more insight into how to make the judgments we need to make to both be good and to know good.

Impulsiveness, weakness and knowing what you are doing

If people can’t be held accountable for their actions, then there’s really no such thing as ethics. If “good’ and “bad” are really purely relative, then obviously moral codes or legal codes would simply be arbitrary systems and we could do anthropology or sociology or political science to understand why different groups made the arbitrary choices they did.

What Aristotle has argued so far is that people indeed can be held accountable for their actions when they know what they are doing, even if they don’t necessarily see all the consequences of their choices right off. Now we need to build on this and see if there’s anything else interesting going on ethically.

We humans in fact sometimes do what we know we should not and fail to do what we know we should. And according to Plato and Aristotle, the reason for these failures is the pursuit of pleasure – the satisfaction of our desires. We don’t always choose to pursue pleasure rather than what we are supposed to do, sometimes it can be involuntary – but then again we often succumb to pleasure even after deliberation.

Aristotle says the reason we sometimes choose to go for what is pleasant as if it is good and we avoid pain as if it is bad, is that pleasure often appears to be good even when it isn’t. In a word, the promise of pleasure fools us.

Lack of Self Control: Impulsiveness or Weakness

Understanding how we get fooled by pleasure that is only apparently good requires us to understand what self control is and why it sometimes disappears. Doing this requires having a solid grasp of what the emotions are and how they work to strengthen or undermine our deliberation and resolve. This is so important that failure to do so leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ethics.

Aristotle explains that there are two ways a person can lack self control: impulsiveness and weakness. Impulsive people have a sensitive temperament and are hasty, irritable, intense and act without deliberation. They have a strong natural inclination to follow perceptual appearances (as we do when we are walking around thinking of nothing in particular) rather than waiting for reason to do its work. In Plato’s terms, these people are ruled by their spirit. In Homer’s terms, the thymos of people like Achilles is calling the shots for them. These people tend to find themselves acting without knowing what they should do. Weak people on the other hand, act after deliberation so they do know what they should do, but fail to stick to their conclusions. In Plato’s terms, these people are mastered by their appetitive part. Aristotle says that weak people are held in greater disdain than impulsive ones because they lose self control from a much more manageable state of emotions.

So lets recap: humans can deliberate and therefore our actions can be voluntary. As long as we know what are doing we are acting voluntarily. So really, its largely up to us whether we are going to do what we believe to be the best thing to do in any given situation. But sometimes we don’t. We either get so riled up that we act without knowing what we are doing or we know what to do but chose not to do it because we think we’ll get more pleasure from doing something else. And if something is done unknowingly it is done counter-voluntarily.

But we still need to know whether emotionally based actions are voluntary or not. Aristotle says all emotional actions are done knowingly. So that would mean that they are always voluntary. But you might recall that if something is done knowingly, it can’t be done out of ignorance. This might ring some alarm bells for you because after all, we do talk of people being “blinded by rage” or “made dumb by fear”. Yet at the same time we do punish people for acts committed under the influence of intense emotion, even if we do often consider the outcome to be mitigated somewhat by the presence of strong emotion (killing someone in a fit of rage for attacking your child or sibling is likely to get you much less of a sentence than calmly killing that same person weeks after the incident.)

So there’s a tension there in the common sense, practical ways we think of and handle emotional action. Aristotle wants to capture this tension rather than hide it and explain whether and how it is that emotional actions can sometimes be voluntary yet lacking in reasoning, at other times completely calculated, and still other times be completely uncontrollable.

The way he captures the tension and explains the three tiers of emotional action is by distinguishing two ways of being ignorant: You can act by reason of ignorance or in ignorance of something. Acting by reason of ignorance means choosing to act based on the wrong reasons. Acting in ignorance means you are literally not in a position to use knowledge you may have or ought to have.  So if you had way to much to drink and then do something stupid, well your actions while so very drunk are done in ignorance of things you probably know. But if you choose to do something like buy a bunch of stuff you really can’t afford because “you deserve it” you know you shouldn’t but you are rationalizing it with a mountain of B.S., so you are acting by reason of ignorance.

Together Aristotle’s weakness/impulsiveness distinction and the two types of ignorance allow us to organically formulate a complicated, insightful distinction between emotions of greater and lesser strength and cognitive content. And thus Aristotle’s ethics has a well-grounded, intellectually legitimate, common-sense understanding of the emotions in ethics.

Taking all this together, we can see that Aristotle identifies for us two types of emotion:

1. Emotions that are rapid, strong and nearly impossible to overcome, those that get the best of us especially those of us who are quick tempered.
2.  Emotions that burn slowly, and are informed by reflection. A person should be able to either decline to follow them or bring their force in line with the conclusions of deliberation.

Aristotle knows that this is everyone’s basic stance since it is everyone’s general assumption that when issuing blame or praise, we ought to have more sympathy or at least understanding for those who do to emotional influence act unintentionally but voluntarily (voluntarily but w/o prior deliberation) and harm others than we do for those who harm others out of, e.g. drunk driving.

In the next post we’ll take on relativism and finalize the explanation for how we act good or bad with respect to the emotions.