Against Our Better Judgment

Against traditional approaches to akrasia, in this chapter I argue that akratic actions result not from a contest between judgment and desire but rather from a conflict between an agent’s competing interests. To make this argument, I first offer a novel phenomenological account of human interests and their relation to spontaneous non-deliberative action. I then use that account to describe two distinct types of plan-discordant action, i.e., intention-shift and akrasia. This approach points to a new way out of an old impasse in the literature on akrasia and opens a hitherto neglected area of phenomenological research.