The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
SR’s remarkable growth as an independent magazine is based largely on word of mouth. Here are examples of our journalism:
* SR played a leading role in the successful campaign to save St Margaret of Scotland Hospice
* SR campaigned for greater transparency in Scottish public life and won a landmark judgement from the Scottish information commissioner which has led to a transformation in the information available about executive salaries and pensions in public bodies
* Having discovered elderly people still living in a near-derelict block of flats in Glasgow, sometimes without a water supply, SR campaigned to have them decently re-housed. With the help of Scotland’s housing minister, Alex Neil, we succeeded
* SR continues to campaign – so far without success – to broaden the range of appointments to national organisations beyond a self-perpetuating elite
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better
Eileen Reid
According to Aristotle, when we act contrary to our best interests it is as though we are mad or drunk, in states when our intellectual faculties are on hold, and impotent to fight against our desires.
But this kind of explanation doesn’t work in cases of akrasia. Smokers, caught between the long-second-order desire to be a non-smoker and the first-order desire for a fag, know full well the reasons for quitting the habit. The health benefits alone should be enough to motivate us to stop – if not the money, smell, and dreadful example we set for the younger (particularly female) generation. But smokers do not quit once they are aware of the reasons for doing so. What explains their behaviour? Addiction is not a necessity, so cannot be held entirely to blame. The question is: how is it that an otherwise rational person freely and intentionally chooses a course of action that, according their own considered judgement, is not in their best interest?
Some philosophers have tried to explain this weakness as an illusion. According to this line of thought, if a person says he or she believes that a course of action is the best thing to do, but then fails to act accordingly, one should suspect hypocrisy. For example, if you claim to believe that second-hand smoke is a serious carcinogen, and yet you continue to smoke in the car while running the kids to school, you must expect people to doubt your sincerity. Either you don’t really believe second-hand smoke is a threat, or you don’t care about the risks as much as you claim – weakness of the will has nothing to do with it.
There is something to this illusion theory, but it doesn’t convince those who experience guilt and distress because they have repeatedly failed to act as they know they should. Perhaps, then, we should say that they are not free. Some philosophers argue that cases of akrasia show that we are not really in control of our behaviour at all: behaviour, personality and character are all formed by forces beyond our control, and although we think we are free to choose, in fact we could not have acted otherwise. This argument can alleviate guilt (I have resorted to it myself at times) but at the cost of saying that we are never responsible for our actions.
Perhaps a more attractive line to take is to say, with Plato and Aristotle, that when we act contrary to our best interests, we do so because we have, at the crucial moment, lost sight of our best interests. Smokers know that they ought to give up smoking. But is that knowledge at the forefront of minds at the moment of temptation? Do our desires and needs not cloud our perceptions of what is important at our moment of greatest weakness? According to Aristotle, when we act contrary to our best interests it is as though we are mad or drunk, in states when our intellectual faculties are on hold, and impotent to fight against our desires. It is only later, when the brain re-engages, that our unclouded vision returns, and remorse sets in.
So there it is – original sin or madness. When you read this I should be lying on a beach in Fuerteventura, having run up and down for half an hour, eaten a few grains and looking forward to my 142ml of Rioja tonight…On second thoughts, maybe I’ll fail better next time instead.
Eileen Reid is head of widening participation, Glasgow School of Art,
writing here in a personal capacity.
