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People break diets, procrastinate in the face of looming deadlines, imbibe too much alcohol the night before a midterm, struggle to save money, and lash out at loved ones and family members. They do all these things despite their best intentions not to. Why do people engage in such personally, interpersonally, and socially destructive behaviors? This chapter suggests that a major reason why people fail at self-control is because it relies on a limited resource. We define self-control as the capacity to alter one's responses; it is what enables people to forego the allure of short-term pleasures to institute responses that bring long-term rewards. One of the core functions of self-control may be to facilitate culture, which often requires that people curtail selfishness for the sake of effective group functioning. The first part of the chapter gives an overview of how self-control operates, including the possible biological basis of self-control. It covers a substantial body of literature suggesting that self-control operates on a limited resource, which becomes depleted with use. The second part of the chapter reviews the benefits of good self-control and the costs of bad self-control across a large variety of domains, such as consumption, self-presentation, decision making, rejection, aggression, and interpersonal relationships.

Economists, psychologists, and philosophers have written extensively on the causes of procrastination. While their work helps us understand why people procrastinate, it does not explain how they can resist the urge to procrastinate. This chapter argues that this is a result of a refusal to acknowledge a faculty of choice, or a will, separate from preferences or desires, which can overwhelm their pull. Based on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as contemporary work in volitionism, this chapter applies to procrastination a Kantian-economic model of decision making that emphasizes strength of character and willpower, which can serve as alternatives to the coping strategies offered elsewhere in the literature.

This chapter examines arguments over government paternalism derived from considerations of individual well-being. It begins with a discussion of the classical economic model of rationality and the emergence of an alternative model during the twentieth century. It then reviews an increasing volume of evidence from behavioral economics and psychology of the so-called “reasoning failure”: the fact that individuals, in trying to achieve the end of improving their well-being, tend to make mistakes and do so in a systematic way. Four possible sources for such failure are discussed: limited technical ability, limited imagination, limited willpower, and limited objectivity. The chapter concludes by rejecting ends-related paternalism but accepting the well-being case for means-related paternalism.

This chapter extends the accounts of valuing and of agential authority to puzzles about rational willpower in the face of temptation. It explores two approaches, one that focuses on the agential authority of certain policies of action, and one that focuses on the reasonable stability of such policies. In each case, the chapter seeks to understand the implications of the basic features of our temporally extended planning agency for the rationality of certain forms of willpower. It also examines basic issues about the relations between practical reason and the metaphysics of planning agency. Donald Davidson famously emphasized that “incontinence is not essentially a problem in moral philosophy, but a problem in the philosophy of action.” This chapter argues that temptation is primarily a problem about the interaction between instrumental rationality and structures of agency. It considers an approach that appeals more broadly to the roles of evaluative rankings in the psychic economy of our agency.

This chapter reviews the interaction among psychology, pedagogy, and the modernists' moralistic view of the psychological profile necessary for the individuals to function properly in modern society. Willpower was believed to be not only the single most important factor in a person's ability to exercise self-control and self-reliance, but also the key psychological quality in a nation. The trouble with the notion of willpower as the key to human action is its vagueness, something that had troubled thinkers in the nineteenth-century. In France and other Western countries in the late nineteenth century, not only scientists, but the public in general, became concerned about weak willpower. Iranian authors agreed that willpower is something which is slowly taught rather than given. Only persistent self-control and exercise can maintain willpower.

This book has investigated the microfoundations of resolve in international relations by connecting international relations scholarship with a burgeoning body of research on willpower and self-control in other disciplines. It has found relatively consistent evidence in favor of the importance of the costs of backing down, but less so with the costs of fighting. At a broader level, the book also finds evidence in favor of an interactionist theory of resolve. This concluding chapter discusses the ramifications of the book's findings for the rationalist international relations literature, the public opinion literature, and the literature evaluating the public's prudence, rationality, and consistency. In particular, it challenges the standard understanding of resolve as private information that decision-makers can access but foreign rivals cannot. It also considers the so-called “dark side of resolve,” the distinction between situations and dispositions, whether leaders are homogenous, and a pure dispositional theory of resolve.

Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.

A significant body of research suggests that self-control and willpower are resources that become depleted as they are exercised. Having to exert self-control and willpower draws down a person’s reservoir of these resources and makes subsequent such exercises more difficult. This ego depletion renders individuals more susceptible to manipulation by exerting nonrational influences on individual choice and conduct. In particular, ego depletion results in later choices being less governable by a person’s powers of self-control and willpower than earlier choices. This chapter draws out three implications of this phenomenon: (1) manipulation can exploit ego depletion through the fashioning of social environments that tax willpower or self-control; (2) ego depletion undermines the Platonic-Aristotelian picture of character and strength of will; and (3) ego depletion needs to be a more central focus of theorists of justice, since it appears to be a significant contributor to poverty and other persistent injustices.

This chapter identifies biological sources of our susceptibility to temptations such as those in the Seven Deadly Sins and examines psychological sources of virtues that enable us to resist such temptations, to delay gratification, and to manage our antisocial urges. It suggests that although the primitive strategies that we consider immoral may have been adaptive for our ancient ancestors, they are often, but not always, maladaptive in modern environments. It argues that although primitive brain mechanisms that evolved in ancient environments may dispose us to behave in immoral ways, they can be overridden by later-evolved and later-developing mental mechanisms that enable us to exert enough self-control to promote our long-term interests in modern environments. It reviews evidence that the ability to exert self-control tends to increase in children as they acquire increasingly advanced cognitive abilities.

Here we search for analyses of the psyche which could function as a complement to our economic world. The behaviourist and the cognitive approaches offer insights into the automatic and the deliberate parts of human behaviour. The biological and the social-psychological approaches show that the brain, as well as the social context of a person, is an important environmental variable. The psycho-dynamic and the humanist approaches, however, are about the psyche as a system, the elements that constitute the system, and the mechanism(s) which determine the way the psyche functions. Behavioural economics attempts to link psychology and orthodox economics. But this approach fails to offer a proper conceptualization and analysis of the phenomenon of (ir)rationality. The psycho-dynamic and humanist perspective offers the elements necessary to construct our so-called psychic world. Willpower can reduce the conflict between actual self and true self in such a way that the person maximizes his self-respect.

The meaning of a concept is determined by its context. In our integrated world, typical economic concepts, such as utility, rationality, efficiency, technology, price, costs, and benefits, have a broader meaning. So with typical psychological and typical sociological concepts: because of the broader context, the meaning of self, willpower, mentality, and also of morality, institutions, culture, values, and norms, change. Multidisciplinary economists make cost/benefit analyses, which differ significantly from the traditional economic analysis. Main phenomena such as discrimination, inequality, and European integration will be approached more realistically. The model can be improved by making it dynamic and by placing it in the context of an open system. Parsimony requires analyses to be as simple as possible. If, in a particular case, it is obvious that the economic or the psychological or the sociological aspect does not play an important role, that part of the analysis can be skipped, of course.

This chapter argues that addiction can usefully be seen as a form of akrasia, an ancient philosophical concept referring to acting against one’s better judgment. Ordinary akrasia and addiction can be located at extremes on a continuum of frequency of akratic actions. Four criteria essential to “core akratic action” also apply to addiction—that it must be: (1) free; (2) intentional; (3) contrary to the agent’s better judgment based on practical reasoning; (4) consciously recognized as contrary to better judgment at the time of action. The chapter concludes by briefly describing four lines of current theory and research on addiction with parallels to philosophical accounts of akrasia: (1) behavioral economic theories; (2) dual-process cognitive theory; (3) “willpower” and ego depletion; and (4) neuroscientific research on deficits to self-regulation. Finding ways these lines of enquiry can converge is an exciting task for theory and research on addiction.

“[M]‌ost alcoholics … have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically non-existent” (Alcoholics Anonymous). In active addiction, when an addict who is trying to control or cease using attempts to choose to abstain, but fails, he chooses against his own will. He has lost the power to choose as he wants. Often, when an abstinent addict relapses, the relapse is preceded by a cognitive dysfunction that selectively disables his willpower in relation to his substance. These modes of disempowerment in choice making are correctly explained by a specific disease theory of addiction, articulated in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous, and subsequently vindicated by contemporary cognitive/affective neuroscience. The cognitive dysfunction that precedes relapse is caused by stress. Twelve-step programs are effective at relapse prevention and are so because they are comprehensive stress-reduction and management programs.

Many philosophers think that it is only because we happen to want or care about things that we think some things of value. We start off caring about things, and then project these desires onto the external world. This chapter makes a preliminary case for the opposite view, that it is our evaluative thinking that is prior. On this view, it is only because we think some things of value that we care about or want anything at all. This view explains (i) the special role that pleasure and pain play in our motivational systems, (ii) why phenomenal consciousness evolved, and (iii) how the two main competing theories of normative reasons for action—objectivism and subjectivism—can be reconciled. The chapter responds to the most serious objections to this view, including that it cannot account for temptation and willpower, or for the existence and appropriateness of the reactive attitudes.

This chapter explores some roles willpower might play in a Christian’s grace-empowered attempt to “make every effort to supplement [his or her] faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:5, ESV). Working from a distinction Robert Adams makes between “motivational” and “structural” virtues, West argues that virtues of the latter sort—of which self-control, perseverance, and patience are paradigm examples—are partially constituted by willpower. He then draws on recent empirical studies of self-regulation to explain how the wise exertion of willpower can help one not only resist temptation, but also leverage temptation in the interest of cultivating virtues in both of Adams’s categories.

Chapter 8 explains how we exercise willpower: by intentionally redirecting attention away from vividly represented temptation and towards less vividly represented goals. Redirecting attention raises the vividness of goals, amplifying our desire to attain them. Exercising willpower requires effort and is hard to sustain because it requires redirecting attention against the automatic tendency to attend to vividly represented objects of desire. This explanation is compatible with a Humean motivational calculus on which we always maximize expected satisfaction of our occurrent desires. It’s also compatible with the dual-process model popular in contemporary psychology, explaining how cognitive systems are implemented by desire, attention, and representational states.