Akrasia and Pleasure
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"Aristotle accepts one aspect of the Socratic description, that the wrongdoer, and in particular the akrates, is misled by pleasure. But he stands the description on its head: the akrates is not ignorant because he is misled by pleasure; rather, his being misled by pleasure is an instance of, or sometimes the consequence of, a culpable ignorance.... the intellectual failures of some wrongdoers rest in the sorts of character traits for which they are responsible, the ways they conceive of, and react to, pleasure." (RORTY-1980a, pp. 268-269) [PSA: also relevant here is overall ignorance of the good.]

"The akrates ... temporarily forgets his knowledge of what is good because he has put himself in a situation and in a condition in which his perceptions of pleasure are so affected that he acts from his reactions (pathe) rather than from his knowledge (1151a20-28)." (RORTY-1980a, p. 272) [PSA: as ROOCHNIK puts it, the akrates actually forgets his knowledge of what is *not* good.]

"Passion-based actions are still voluntary when the person is responsible for putting himself in the position where he could predictably be so affected; or a person could be responsible for developing the habit of reacting that way (1114a25ff)." (RORTY-1980a, p. 275)

"It is the manner of his reactions to pleasures that misleads the akrates: he acts from his reactions to what is before him, perceiving - misperceiving - what he does in terms of its pleasurable effects on him rather than seeing his situation, and his actions in it, as defined by his proper intentional ends [PSA: i.e., commitments]." (RORTY-1980a, p. 277)

"[T]he akrates treats the good of the activity as if it were a pleasure independent of the activity that defines it." (RORTY-1980a, p. 278)

"Against hedonists he argues that because pleasure is ingredient in and not product of activities, it cannot be evaluated or measured independently of the worth of the activity." (RORTY-1980a, p. 278)

"[T]he akrates' failures of knowledge are not *merely* failures of knowledge; and the condition that generates akrasia is one in which he has voluntarily placed himself. That he has the wrong sorts of reactions, or that he acts from his reactions, or that he tends to place himself in the sorts of situations and conditions where he will predictably misperceive his pleasures and act from those misperceptions is a failure of character. He has habits that give his pathe undue dominance in the determination of his actions.... he detaches pleasures from their intentional weighting.... he reacts to such pleasures in ways that lead him to forget what he knows. But his reacting that way falls - or can fall - within the realm of the voluntary." (RORTY-1980a, p. 279)

"While the pleasures of natural activities are, or can be, intrinsically good, a person who attends primarily to the activity as pleasurable will tend to separate out the pleasurable in the activity from the activity itself. He will come to value the activity for the pleasure instead of seeing the pleasure as dependent on the character of the activity." (RORTY-1980a, p. 282)

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