Abstracts

• Too much self-control?
  Hannah Altehenger (Konstanz)
  It seems commonsensical to say that one cannot merely have too little, but also too much self-control. In the few instances where this issue has been discussed within philosophy (Kennett 2001, Brownstein 2018), theorists have generally shared this view. By contrast, this talk argues that it is very doubtful whether there is any interesting sense in which this view is justified. Specifically, it examines in detail the ‘global loss view’ which claims that once an agent’s general level of self-control exceeds a certain threshold, this has some serious negative consequences for various domains of the agent’s life. The talk’s main contention is that the global loss view, although admittedly possessing some initial appeal, fails to withstand closer scrutiny. First, it is shown that this view is largely fueled by the idea that agents with a very high level of self-control will display various problematic forms of ‘overcontrol’, such as ‘over-habitualization’, ‘over-planning’, ‘over-deliberation’, ‘emotional overcontrol’ or ‘an over-emphasis on the future’. Relying on certain general considerations about the nature of self-control, it is then argued that these different forms of overcontrol, rather than being the result of very high self-control, actually prove to be the result of something else which might be called ‘rigidity’. Finally, it is shown that, in an interesting turn-about, part of the remedy for rigidity is more self-control.

• Temptation and apathy
  Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Externado & Neuchâtel)
  Self-control, the ability to master motivation to act in accordance with our commitments, is essential to guiding action in accordance with reasons despite motivational obstacles and has been found to robustly increase long-term wellbeing. But how exactly does self-control contribute to rational agency and wellbeing? Recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s impulses makes no significant difference to long-term goal attainment. In fact, continuously resisting temptations seems to be in some ways harmful. Thus, if self-control is identical with the effortful resistance of temptation, it is unclear how it contributes to improving our lives. We argue that, to clarify self-control’s value, we need to revise the role that overcoming temptations plays in the concept of self-control. We distinguish two kinds of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a powerful wayward motivation) and apathy (the absence of a commitment-advancing motivation). Apathy problems are philosophically relevant because they show that overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for exerting self-control. The temptation/apathy distinction allows us to distinguish between negative self-control (i.e. self-control aimed at overcoming temptation) and positive self-control (i.e. self-control aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). We argue that different mixes of self-control strategies are appropriate for positive and negative self-control, and provide evidence that these philosophical distinctions fit with common-sense thinking about self-control: laypeople distinguish between temptation and apathy problems, and they suggest a different mix of strategies for each in accordance with our theory. In sum, our paper shows that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, because apathy problems are and just as central to it. We propose that updating our view of motivational mastery (as the ability to both overcome temptation and bolster commitment-consistent motivation) helps us better understand the value of self-control for rational action and wellbeing. (This is a collaboration with co-authors Samantha Berthelette, Gabriela Fernández, Diego Rodíguez, and Alfonso Anaya.)

• What is difficulty?
  Malte Hendricx (Michigan)
  What is difficulty, and how does it relate to effort? Recent accounts of difficulty try to explain difficulty in terms of effort. I argue that this is wrong, and propose a novel, empirically-grounded account of difficulty in terms of the cognitive science-based notion of “executive demand”. I show that my account stays faithful to folk psychological intuitions about difficulty, including the meaningful relation between difficulty and effort. I further show that my account explains the role of difficulty in learning and in the attribution of moral responsibility. The result is a thorough, psychologically plausible, and philosophically illuminating reductive explanation of difficulty.
  Existing accounts attempt explanations of difficulty mainly in terms of effort. Yet these accounts center around a feelings-based account of effort that posits effort to be a primitive concept. This is wrong: different kinds of effort can be distinguished and dissociated. I present real-world cases in which effort and difficulty are decoupled to illustrate the need for an alternative explanation of difficulty.
  I propose an explanation of difficulty in terms of executive demand. When faced with a task, we sometimes employ automatic, habitual responses. At other times, we employ controlled, top-down executive resources. The degree to which the latter are used depends on the nature of the task, with novel, complex tasks typically requiring a higher level of executive contribution. It also depends on the agent in question, as skill at a given task allows agents to solve more components of a task reliably with automated processing. Executive demand describes the extent to which a task requires executive contribution of a particular agent. I argue that executive demand explains difficulty. That is, an activity is difficult for an agent to the degree to which an executive contribution is demanded of the agent in order to perform it to a target level of reliability.
  I argue my account captures the intuitions underlying existing accounts of difficulty. I further argue that only my account preserves central features of difficulty, such as difficulty’s domain-generality and the functional role of difficulty in learning, skill, and moral responsibility.
  1. The subjective experience of effort tends to be correlated with the deployment of executive capacities. But executive deployment and effort can be decoupled, wherein it becomes apparent that only executive deployment predicts difficulty: Increased rewards for an activity decrease effort without decreasing the difficulty, as does entering effortless flow states, characteristically elicited only by difficult activities. Sustained mental focus, such as practiced by expert meditators, becomes effortless despite requiring executive deployment: hence, it remains difficult.
  2. Executive resources, unlike sensation-based accounts of effort, are domain-general. My account thereby uniquely allows the comparison of levels of difficulty across domains (e.g. physical and mental activities).
  3. When we learn, the difficulty of tasks decreases because of decreasing executive demand. Learning typically initially involves executively-controlled rehearsal, then executively less demanding recall, and ultimately can lead to fully automatic processing of activities. As we learn, executive demand is reduced, explaining the relationship between difficulty and learning.
  4. The most difficult activities demand the highest executive contributions of agents, typically increasing the frequency of error. At some point, errors cannot be further averted by increasing executive contributions (“trying harder”), and agents are not morally responsible for them, since they could not have avoided what they do. The same cannot be said for “hesitant” agents refusing to perform a doable but difficult activity, or for “lazy” agents that could have averted the error by increasing executive contribution. By illuminating the connection between difficulty and non-culpable error, my account thereby explains why and when difficulty mitigates moral responsibility.
  In summary, the executive demand account of difficulty is intuitively plausible, empirically grounded, and philosophically informative.

• Giving up or giving in?
  Eleanor Holton (Oxford) & Richard Holton (Cambridge)
  Most philosophical discussions of strength of will have focused on temptation: on what is needed to resist giving in to appealing alternatives. In contrast a body of work in neuroscience has focussed on when foragers give up on an existing task, and start looking for alternatives. It might seem that that these are just two sides of a the same coin: to give up on what one is doing is to give in to a tempting alternative, and the orthodox choice framework in which preference is understood as a ranking of two alternatives, can encourage that. But phenomenologically the two seem very different. We present some provisional findings that the neural mechanisms involved in the two phenomena are actually very different, and hence that self control is not a unitary thing. We reflect on the philosophical significance.

• Really situated self-control
  Annemarie Kalis (Utrecht)
  Traditionally, self-control is conceptualized in terms of internal processes such as willpower, or motivational mechanisms. These processes supposedly explain how agents manage to exercise self-control or, in other words, how they act on the basis of their best judgment in the face of conflicting motivation. Against the mainstream view that self-control can be explained in terms of internal processes or mechanisms, several authors have recently argued for the inclusion of situated factors in our understanding of self-control. In this paper, we review such recent attempts and argue that even though they integrate situational features, these accounts hold on to an orthodox, 'internalist' view of cognition. Instead, we will argue that in order to develop a really situated account of self-control, it is necessary to radically rethink what self-control is. We will outline requirements for a really situated account of self-control and discuss some implications for empirical research.

• Doing enough
  Sarah Paul, (NYU Abu Dhabi)
  There is a sense of ‘effort’ that can be contrasted with ‘giving up’. In virtue of what might it be the case that an agent gave up prematurely, such that there is a sense in which she should have exerted more effort to achieve her goal? Jennifer Hornsby glosses ‘trying to A” as ‘doing what one can to A’, implying that an agent who does not do all she can to A did not try to A. We might therefore consider saying that an agent gives up too soon when she has the goal of A-ing, but does not do all she can and thus fails to try to A. I argue that this conception of trying is too demanding, however. When we adopt a goal that we are uncertain we can achieve, we do not necessarily commit ourselves to doing all we can to achieve it. This leads us to ask: wherein lies the extent of the agent’s commitment, if not in the very concept of trying? I will explore various ways of thinking about the idea of ‘strength of commitment’, and whether this notion can be reduced to some other feature(s) of the agent’s psychology.

• Self-Control Gone Wrong: Why the ideal of volitional unity can foster self-despotism
  Damiano Ranzenigo (Konstanz)
  With few notable exceptions, there is broad agreement in the literature on self-control that there are no downsides to having great self-control. Understanding self-control in a way inspired by Harry Frankfurt, however, I argue that there is a real-world psychological profile that exemplifies the possibility of ‘too much’ self-control, namely the self-despotic person. Harry Frankfurt has influentially emphasized the importance of volitional unification both for reaching important goals and for having a meaningful life (Frankfurt, 1998, 1999). Volitional unification is obtained through identification with certain desires and externalization of incompatible ones. This process of identification and externalization can be interpreted as the exercise of self-control (as for Schechtman, 2004): a person is self-controlled if she succeeds in being moved by desires with which she identifies, whereas lacks self-control if her actions are determined by desires she has externalized (as in the case of the unwilling addict). Although self-control in terms of identification and externalization is a positive ideal, a particular development of this conception cannot be considered positive, let alone an ideal: becoming self-despotic (see also Schechtman, 2004). The self-despotic person exercises indiscriminate self-control over herself by externalizing inner resistance to a core of more coherent mental states, thereby impoverishing herself as a person. The self-despotic person is highly volitionally unified, and so, entirely reflects the Frankfurtian ideal, however at the cost of becoming a stereotype of herself. Self-despotic people are not just an undesired theoretical consequence of an unrestrained ideal of volitional unity, but rather can be non-pathological, real-world people.
  In support of this claim, I analyze the case of Mr Stevens, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989). Mr Stevens is so devoted to his profession as a butler, that he suppresses his feelings over and over for the sake of embodying the ideal of ‘dignity’ he takes to be the distinctive quality of the perfect butler. For instance, he ignores his own ‘great concern’ at the dismissal of two housemaids based on antisemitic reasons to please his Master and silences his romantic feelings for poor Miss Kenton because he finds them inappropriate for their professional relationship. When recalling these and other similar episodes, Mr Stevens doesn’t feel regret and is even proud of how he behaved. Whilst exceptionally self-controlled and volitionally unified, Mr Stevens is the stereotype of a butler rather than a full-blown person. Like Mr Stevens, people too engrossed in single activities (e.g., their professions, romantic relationships, money-making, etc.) to the detriment of other important parts of their lives (friendships, professional realization, taking care of one’s health, etc.) can be seen as embodying various degrees of self-despotism.
  A tentative conclusion that can be drawn from the above is that self-control goes wrong when understood in terms of unrestrained volitional unification exercised over oneself globally. Self-control through internalization and externalization is ‘good’ and arguably never too much if considered piecemeal, about specific purposes, but if seen as a way of self-managing one’s whole life, it risks turning into self-despotism.

• It is impossible to be morally responsible for (irrationally) giving in to temptation: an epistemic regress argument
  Chandra Sripada, (U Michigan)
  When a person gives in to temptation, they act irrationally in the sense that they hinder the achievement of their own (sincerely held) aims. Additionally, it is widely thought, people are usually morally responsible for their temptation-directed actions. It is here argued that given a certain empirically well supported picture of human psychological architecture, we must reject the second claim. I formulate an epistemic regress argument in which temptation-directed actions are necessarily accompanied by a certain serious form of ignorance, and, furthermore, this ignorance cannot be something for which the agent is culpable.