Intention and Weakness of Will*

I do not agree that this is the untutored view. Whenever I have asked non-philosophers what they take weakness of will to consist in, they have said things like this: weak-willed people are irresolute; they don’t persist in their intentions; they are too easily deflected from the path that they have chosen. My aim in this paper is to pursue this line of thought. I shall develop the idea that the central cases of weakness of will are best characterized not as cases in which people act against their better judgement, but as cases in which they fail to act on their intentions. Of course, to say this is not to say enough. Not every case of a failure to act on one’s intentions is a case of weakness of will. Sometimes we realize that our intentions were ill-judged, or that circumstances have changed to make them inappropriate. When, in such cases, we fail to act on our intentions, we need not display weakness of will. So a large part of this paper will be concerned with saying what kind of failure to act on one’s intention does constitute weakness of will. The basic idea is this. Just as it takes skill to form and employ beliefs, so it takes skill to form and employ intentions. In particular, if intentions are to fulfil their function, they need to be relatively resistant to reconsideration. Weakness of will arises, I shall suggest, when agents are too ready to reconsider their intentions. In taking this approach I depart from almost all of the literature on the subject.2 Since I find the approach obvious, this calls for some explanation. I suspect that there are two factors at work. Firstly there has been, until quite recently, a widespread suspicion of the notion of intention. Some have said that intentions are a philosopher’s invention, a misleading reification of the legitimate talk of intentional action. Others, whilst prepared to concede a place to intentions, have held them to be reducible to beliefs and desires, or else to beliefs and desires and their relations to action. Such considerations have led