Sunday, January 25, 2009

Weakness of Will


The dude in the photo above is 70 years old.

In Gerald Dworkin's essay on paternalism, he has a rather interesting aside in which he suggests that philosophers thinking about weakness of will should focus on cases like people neglecting to wear their seatbelts rather than the more exotic sort of cases that they tend to worry about. I submit that the photo above presents a similar challenge, because we all know that doing yoga is really good for you (just look at that dude!) but few do it, and even fewer do it regularly. What explains our motivational failure? Is there any difference between laziness and weakness of will? Why don't we think laziness is a philosophically interesting topic?

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