I don’t think akrasia can apply to the area traditionally considered to be morality. If you believe doing something would be evil, that feels different from it being merely suboptimal and harmful to yourself. For example, you like playing TF2, even though it may be a suboptimal to play it at times, but even though it’s a habit, you’d instantly stop doing it if, say, the player avatars in TF2 were real beings that experienced terror, pain, and suffering in the course of gameplay. It stands to reason that eating meat would be the same.
I searched for “I want to be vegan but love meat” It was in google autocomplete and has plenty of results including this Yahoo answers page which explicitly mentions that the poster wants to be a vegetarian for ethical reasons.
I don’t think that’s a counterexample. If I had a billionaire uncle who willed me his fortune, I could say something like “I like money but I don’t want to commit murder”—and then I wouldn’t commit murder. Liking the taste of meat and still abstaining from it because you think eating it is evil is similar.
The point of it wasn’t to say that people like meat. The point was that people have or expect akrasia from not eating meat enough that they search Google and ask people on question sites for help.
I used to believe like you that if you believe something is morally good then you would do it. That axiom used to be a corner stone in my model of morality. There was actually a stage in my life where my moral superiority provided most of my self esteem and disobeying it was unthinkable. When I encountered belief in belief I couldn’t make sense of it at all. I was further confused that they didn’t admit it when I explained how they were being inconsistent.
But besides that I don’t think humans evolved to have that kind of consistency . I believe that humans act mostly according to reinforcement. Morality does provide a form of reinforcement in the sense that you feel good when you act morally and worse otherwise, however if there was a sufficient external motivator such as extreme torture then you would eventually give in, perhaps rationalizing the decision.
I would suggest the people who have commented here read this post if they haven’t yet because there have been two arguments over definitions here already (first with consistency and then the definition of “genuine belief”) and there is a reason that is frowned upon. You should also see Belief in belief for better understanding how people can act contrary to their stated morals and behave in contradictory ways. (It typically comes up a lot with religious people, who don’t try to be as moral as they can be despite viewing it as good)
I don’t think akrasia can apply to the area traditionally considered to be morality. If you believe doing something would be evil, that feels different from it being merely suboptimal and harmful to yourself. For example, you like playing TF2, even though it may be a suboptimal to play it at times, but even though it’s a habit, you’d instantly stop doing it if, say, the player avatars in TF2 were real beings that experienced terror, pain, and suffering in the course of gameplay. It stands to reason that eating meat would be the same.
I searched for “I want to be vegan but love meat” It was in google autocomplete and has plenty of results including this Yahoo answers page which explicitly mentions that the poster wants to be a vegetarian for ethical reasons.
I don’t think that’s a counterexample. If I had a billionaire uncle who willed me his fortune, I could say something like “I like money but I don’t want to commit murder”—and then I wouldn’t commit murder. Liking the taste of meat and still abstaining from it because you think eating it is evil is similar.
The point of it wasn’t to say that people like meat. The point was that people have or expect akrasia from not eating meat enough that they search Google and ask people on question sites for help.
I used to believe like you that if you believe something is morally good then you would do it. That axiom used to be a corner stone in my model of morality. There was actually a stage in my life where my moral superiority provided most of my self esteem and disobeying it was unthinkable. When I encountered belief in belief I couldn’t make sense of it at all. I was further confused that they didn’t admit it when I explained how they were being inconsistent.
But besides that I don’t think humans evolved to have that kind of consistency . I believe that humans act mostly according to reinforcement. Morality does provide a form of reinforcement in the sense that you feel good when you act morally and worse otherwise, however if there was a sufficient external motivator such as extreme torture then you would eventually give in, perhaps rationalizing the decision.
I would suggest the people who have commented here read this post if they haven’t yet because there have been two arguments over definitions here already (first with consistency and then the definition of “genuine belief”) and there is a reason that is frowned upon. You should also see Belief in belief for better understanding how people can act contrary to their stated morals and behave in contradictory ways. (It typically comes up a lot with religious people, who don’t try to be as moral as they can be despite viewing it as good)