Frankfurt and the Problem of Self-Control

Frankfurt’s compatibilist account of free will considers an individual to be free when her first- and second-order volitions align. This structural account of the will, this chapter argues, fails to engage with the dynamics of will, resulting in two shortcomings: (1) the problem of directionality, or that Frankfurtian freedom obtains whenever first- and second-order volitions align, regardless of which desire was made to change, and (2) the potential for infinite regress of higher-order desires. The authors propose that a satisfying account of the genesis of second-order volitions can resolve these issues. To provide this they draw from George Ainslie’s mechanistic account of self-control, which relies on intertemporal bargaining wherein an individual’s self-predictions about future decisions affect the value of her current choices. They suggest that second-order volitions emerge from precisely this sort of process, and that a Frankfurt-Ainslie account of free will avoids the objections previously raised.

Juvenile Self-Control and Legal Responsibility

US criminal courts have recently moved toward seeing juveniles as inherently less culpable than their adult counterparts, influenced by a growing mass of neuroscientific and psychological evidence. In support of this trend, this chapter argues that the criminal law’s notion of responsible agency requires both the cognitive capacity to understand one’s actions and the volitional control to conform one’s actions to legal standards. These capacities require, among other things, a minimal working set of executive functions—a suite of mental processes, mainly realized in the prefrontal cortex, such as planning and inhibition—which remain in significant states of immaturity through late adolescence, and in some cases beyond. Drawing on scientific evidence of how these cognitive and volitional capacities develop in the maturing brain, the authors sketch a scalar structure of juvenile responsibility, and suggest some possible directions for reforming the juvenile justice system to reflect this scalar structure.

Self-Control, Cooperation, and Intention’s Authority

In this chapter the author defends a novel view of the relationships among intention for the future, self-control, and cooperation. The author argues that when an agent forms an intention for the future she comes to regard herself as criticizable if she does not act in accordance with her intention. In contexts where the agent has inclinations that run contrary to her unrescinded intention, her disposition for reflexive criticism helps her to resist these inclinations. Such intentions have, the author argues, a built-in mechanism for exercising self-control. The author goes on to argue that this mechanism can also function as a mechanism for cooperative behavior. Agents are not just equipped to abide by plans for the future, they are also thereby equipped for exercising self-control and for cooperating.

Moralizing Self-Control

In this chapter, the authors synthesize current research and thinking on the topic of self-control moralization. They focus on three parts: (1) similarities and differences between morality and self-control, (2) the process of moralizing self-control, and (3) the consequences of moralizing self-control. They use a moral pluralistic perspective—the idea that there are multiple, sometimes conflicting, moral concerns within and between cultures and individuals—to argue that research on self-control moralization could benefit greatly from exploring the roles of different types of moral concerns, emotions, and social contexts. The chapter discusses when self-control and morality overlap and when they don’t, what this means for moralizing self-control, and how one might be able to leverage moral concerns to achieve greater self-control success and prevent self-control failure.

Self-Control, Agency, and the Placebo Brain Stimulation

This chapter focuses on the relationship between control beliefs and self-control. After providing an overview of the research showing how control beliefs affect self-control performance, the authors present a novel experimental procedure based on a placebo brain stimulation that aims at altering people’s belief about their own self-control. They then describe a heuristic framework that accounts for belief-related changes in self-control performance. The core idea is that beliefs should be conceptualized as metacognitive knowledge about the self and that such metacognitive knowledge is used to predict the success of self-control behavior. When people form the expectation that they can exert self-control but experience failure, they perceive a discrepancy between their expectation and the actual outcome. Under specific circumstances, the perception of such discrepancy or prediction error will motivate people to exert more effort to match their expectation, which will lead to increased self-control.

Children, Responsibility for Self-Control Failures, and Narrative Capacity

Children are often regarded as less morally blameworthy when they fail to control their behavior. If one regards failures of self-control as failures to do what one knows or judges to be best, then one must ask whether children are less blameworthy even when they “know better.” The author argues that children are less blameworthy for these failures because it is harder for them to exercise self-control. She argues that one important reason that it is harder for children to control themselves is that children are still in the process of developing what she calls “narrative capacity.” Her account of this capacity is informed by both psychological and philosophical accounts. The chapter spells out the characteristic features of narrative capacity and illustrates how these are required for self-control.

Exploring the Roles of Emotions in Self-Control

Self-control has been understood since Ancient Greece as reason winning in the battle with emotion. This is an idea that contemporary “divided mind” accounts of self-control take for granted, assuming that emotions are a threat to one’s ability to do what one judges best, all things considered. This historically influential picture neglects the emotions’ potential as tools for self-control. This chapter argues that emotions can help self-control by virtue of how they motivate, by virtue of how they feel, and by virtue of how they evaluate the self. At the same time, each of these three channels can also lead emotions to undermine self-control. Thus, whereas a “divided mind” account recommends fostering self-control by preventing emotions from interfering, the author recommends fostering self-control by developing affective strategies that harness the distinctive powers of emotions to work for self-control rather than against it.

Self-Control as a Coordination Problem

This chapter presents an analysis of self-control from a motivational perspective, modeling it as the resolution of a conflict between proximal and distal concerns. It briefly reviews “divided-mind” models that suggest that self-control entails competition between opposing elements of the mind, and discusses some of the empirical and conceptual challenges to these conceptual frameworks. The authors then propose an alternative account that addresses these challenges, suggesting that coordination of (rather than competition between) elements of the mind is key to self-control. They review empirical evidence for the new model, and then conclude by outlining some of its implications for future research and theory.

The Developmental and Cultural Origins of Our Beliefs about Self-Control

Self-control is quite difficult—sometimes people are successful, but frequently they are not. So why do people believe that they can choose, by their own free will, to exercise self-control? This chapter summarizes recent research exploring the cultural and developmental origins of beliefs about self-control and free will. It discusses how two factors contribute to the development of children’s beliefs about self-control: culture and first-person experiences. The authors’ studies of four- to eight-year-old children (N = 441; mean age = 5.96 years; range = 3.92–8.90 years) from China, Singapore, Peru, and the United States indicate that self-control beliefs differ across cultures, and that, comparatively, US children hold intuitions that they can freely choose to exercise self-control. Additionally, evidence indicates that the experience of self-control failure impacts beliefs about free will in US children, but that these experience effects are not culturally universal.

Mind Control

This chapter explores the relationship between self-control and decision-making. In particular, it examines various problems with the idea that agents can (and do) exercise self-control over their decisions. Two facts about decisions give rise to these problems. First, decisions do not result from intentions to make those very decisions. Second, decisions are often made when agents are uncertain what to do, and thus when agents lack best judgments. On the common understanding of self-control as an ability to act in line with an intention or best judgment (in the face of counter-motivation), decisions are not, and perhaps cannot, be the subject of self-control. In light of this, the authors propose that this common conception of self-control needs revision. As well as commitment-based self-control, they argue that there is also non-commitment-based self-control—the type of self-control over an action that need not involve any prior evaluative or executive commitment.