Acting against your better judgement

I defend a Davidsonian approach to weakness of will against some recent arguments by John McDowell, and adapt the approach to meet other objections. Instead of treating one’s better judgement as a conditional judgement about what is desirable to do given available reasons, it is proposed to treat it as an unconditional judgement about what is desirable to do from a rational perspective that one takes to be the right perspective to have. This makes sense of Aristotle’s claim that desire is for the good or the apparent good: judgements of desirability generally concern the apparent good, whereas judgements of desirability from rational perspectives that are judged to be the ones to have are judgements of the actual good. Weakness of will occurs when one’s actual rational perspective is not the one that one takes to be the one to have - i.e. when one’s judgement of the apparent good does not coincide with one’s judgement of the actual good. One makes two judgements – one from an adopted perspective that one judges to be the one to have and one from one’s actual perspective.