ABSTRACT
So far, since Chapter VIII, I have been treating the question of akrasia as one about the coherence of claiming that an agent can deliberately choose what they consider to be the worse course, without any reference to passions. Obviously, someone who so acted under the influence of fear might be an example, but the assumption has been that the set of cases is far wider than the traditional one. The passionate examples are, nevertheless, worth attention. To begin with, someone puzzled by the sorts of case discussed in the last two chapters might feel them to be intelligible because they always or often require the assumption of the influence of some emotion or passion. In particular, one might feel that passion has its part to play in explaining the feeling that the akratic are irrational, since there is a widespread feeling that there is some opposition between passion or emotion on the one hand and reason on the other. Yet as we have seen in the historical sections, this line of thought gives rise to two related problems: first, how one can reconcile the talk of a conflict between reason and emotion with the description of the behaviour as deliberate; and secondly, how such talk is to be reconciled with belief in a single agent responsible for both sorts of behaviour.
