Reflection on Our Desires: "Free Will" and Procrastination

I might desire a piece of chocolate cake, but at the same time desire that I didn't desire it. This capacity to reflect on our desires and to have "second-order" desires reflects a notion of free will and raises the issue of weakness of will that helps us understand procrastination.

One of the things that separates us from other (non-human) animals in the world is our ability to consciously reflect on our desires. Although my dog may have conflicting desires - for example, to eat now or to chase a ball more - we don't assume that it wishes it didn't want to chase the ball right now, or that it wished it wasn't hungry because it is trying to lose weight. This capacity for the reflection on desires and second-order desires is unique to the human mind.

This self-reflective capacity creates some interesting things for the human mind. Whereas the dog's brain (mind) may weigh off the preference for ball chasing over eating, humans have the capacity to transcend this simple weighing off of desires in decision making. Humans can step back from this crude battle between our desires, the simple weighing of our desires, and reflect on which motive we really want to follow. As I wrote in a previous post, it's an aspect of our humanity that allows us to escape from the "tyranny of preferences" to which a behavioral-economic approach to decision making would limit us.

Harry Frankfurt (Princeton University), famous for his work on free will (and made popular on the Daily Show with his book, On Bullshit), presented this notion of second-order desires as a way of understanding free will. An example related to procrastination might be:

1st order desire: I desire to put off work to relax and play today. (I don't want to work today.)

2nd order desire: I desire not to desire relaxation now because I have work that I intended to do. (I wish I wasn't so lazy today.)

These conflicts in our desires are very common.

Philosophers argue that this is a theory of "real self," as it is the "real self" that is proposed to hold the second-order desire. Frankfurt explains that it's only through our capacity for reflection that we're capable of identifying with our real self.

According to Frankfurt, a person has free will if he or she acts on the desire that he or she wants to win. In other words, free will is the freedom to have the will that you want. With the example above, if I succeed at working on my intended task, then I have free will, because it was the second-order desire that I wanted to win (my real self is the non-procrastinator).

However, we can fail to enact a desire, and we could think of this not as the absence of free will but as a weakness of will.

John Searle is his book Rationality in Action presents a common problem that reflects this weakness of will. In Chapter 7, Weakness of Will, he writes,

". . . I decide, after considering all of the facts known to me that bear on the issue, that it is best for me not to drink wine at dinner tonight, because let us suppose I want to do some work on weakness of will after dinner. But let us suppose that as it turns out, I do drink wine at dinner. The wine being served looked rather tempting, and so in a moment of weakness, I drank it" (p. 227).

Sound familiar? Of course. It's common to all of us. Searle writes, "It is possible, as we all know, for an intention to be strong and unconditional as you like, for nothing to interfere, and still the action does not get done . . . When I form an intention I still have to act on the intention that I have formed." (pp. 231-232).

It's a problem that we know well, and it has deep historical roots in the Greek concept of akrasia - acting against one's better judgment - often equated with weakness of will.

Certainly, Searle sees procrastination as a problem of weakness of will, providing this example in his book,

"Here for example is an all-too-common sort of case: a student forms a firm and unconditional intention to work on his term paper Tuesday evening. Nothing prevents him from working on it, but when midnight comes, it turns out that he has spent the evening watching television and drinking beer" (p. 219).

This gap between intentions (write the term paper) and actions (television and beer) is a gap that Searle discusses at length, and he writes, ". . . this gap will provide the explanation of weakness of will" (p. 220).

Not every philosopher agrees that procrastination is a simple example of akrasia. For example, Sarah Stroud (McGill University) makes a number of arguments against procrastination being weakness of will. If you're interested in this, I had an excellent discussion with her about this topic that is available as a podcast on my iProcrastinate Podcasts. I'm not in agreement with Sarah on this position, and I'm more closely aligned with Searle's analysis.

Procrastination Essential Reads

From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

Breaking Bad: Procrastination

Concluding thoughts
Searle makes many more points that we need to consider to understand procrastination. I'm particularly interested in the nature of causation of what we think of as normal voluntary actions. He writes, ". . . in the case of normal voluntary actions, once the causes are present they still do not compel the agent to act; the agent has to act on the reasons or on his intention" (p. 231).

Searle also writes about freedom and choice. I will return to these issues in future blog posts. They are central to my own thinking about procrastination.

For now, I want to leave you with some of the closing sentences of Searle's chapter on weakness of will about what it means to be irrational. He writes,

"It is irrational of me when I genuinely have a choice to make the wrong choice when I know that it is the wrong choice. The metaphor of ‘weakness' is, I believe, exactly right in these cases, because the question at issue is about the self. The question at issue is not about the weakness of my desires or my convictions, but it is about the weakness of myself in carrying out the decisions I have made" (pp. 236-237).

If we want to understand and deal with procrastination, we'll need to think more about the self, choice and freedom. That's for another day.