Plato and Weakness of Will
Plato claims that if we know an action is right and have no alternative we consider to be superior, we will perform that action. If we fail to do so it is because we have failure of understanding. There have been a number of influential criticisms of this position. Are they convincing?
1 Plato thinks weakness of will is when emotion and desire dominate reason. Aristotle argued that the judgement of the virtuous person is when emotions support reason. It is not that the weak-willed person is ignorant – she may have rational knowledge of the
‘right’ action, but she has had the wrong emotional education and so she does the wrong thing because the emotions fail to support the intellectual knowledge.
2 Is Plato simply begging the question? Let us say I know that it is wrong to eat unhealthy foods. Can I not know this fact and yet still find it very difficult to resist these foods?
3 R M Hare suggests that it is a fundamental error to think that we can explain the motivational force of moral judgements as being based in reason alone. Hare claims that evaluative judgements include emotional responses, and this is why we must act when there is no alternative. So Plato misunderstands the nature of
WoW. It does not occur out of intellectual ignorance.
Apparent cases of WoW are when the person is psychologically incapable of resisting desires or else when the person doesn’t genuinely believe she ought to perform X, and is simply repeating the views of others when she says ‘X is good’.