Akrasia and Uncertainty

Abstract

Standard accounts of practical rationality hold that akrasia—failing to intend what one believes one ought to do—is strictly irrational. However, this requirement holds only when an agent possesses maximum certainty regarding a fully specific, fine-grained course of action. Because normative facts are not rationally luminous, agents inevitably face circumstances involving normative uncertainty. In cases where options are coarsely individuated or confidence is non-maximal, intending an action that one merely believes one ought to do can carry catastrophic risks, rendering such an intention irrational. To accommodate normative uncertainty and varied levels of act individuation, the requirement of practical coherence must be generalized beyond outright normative beliefs. Practical rationality instead requires an agent to adopt a set of intentions that maximizes expected choiceworthiness. In this framework, choiceworthiness serves as a cardinal, objective measure of how closely an option approximates what one ought to do, evaluated against the agent’s rational degrees of belief across possible states. This expected choiceworthiness principle subsumes traditional anti-akrasia constraints as a limiting case of absolute certainty, serving as a fundamental principle of practical rationality that remains structurally distinct from standard expected utility theory. – AI-generated abstract.