One way of making your point is that akrasia is a special case of the Hazing Problem (which, in turn, is similar if not isomorphic to counterfactual mugging), where you define yourself at different timeslices to be different people, and decide whether you want to favor your current self by “hazing” a future self.
(As you might expect, Drescher makes this analogy in Good and Real, though I don’t think he uses the term “akrasia”.)
That is, if you regard it as optimal to give in to your akrasia, that is evidence that you will in the future, and have done so in the past—and you would prefer that past selves had not done so.
Edit: Interestingly enough, right after I read that part of Drescher, I read the first installment of the Se7en graphic novel, which is about the “gluttony sinner”, who fails to lose weight because he uses that very same dynamically inconsistent reasoning!
One way of making your point is that akrasia is a special case of the Hazing Problem (which, in turn, is similar if not isomorphic to counterfactual mugging), where you define yourself at different timeslices to be different people, and decide whether you want to favor your current self by “hazing” a future self.
(As you might expect, Drescher makes this analogy in Good and Real, though I don’t think he uses the term “akrasia”.)
That is, if you regard it as optimal to give in to your akrasia, that is evidence that you will in the future, and have done so in the past—and you would prefer that past selves had not done so.
Edit: Interestingly enough, right after I read that part of Drescher, I read the first installment of the Se7en graphic novel, which is about the “gluttony sinner”, who fails to lose weight because he uses that very same dynamically inconsistent reasoning!