acrasia

noun

1. (archaic, rare, uncountable)Lack of self-control; excess, intemperance; also, irregular or unruly behaviour.

   “Him fortuned (hard fortune ye may gheſſe) / To come, vvhere vile Acraſia does vvonne [live], / Acraſia a falſe enchauntereſſe, / That many errant knightes hath fovvle fordonne: […]”

   “VVaſte your hours in the lap of diſſipation: reſign yourſelf up to the faſcinations of Acrasia; and ſport in the Bovver of Bliss. Cover your tables vvith delicacies, at the expence of your famiſhed clans.”

   “The psychological doctrine of the Gorgias is more mature. It recognizes the presence in the soul of irrational or good-independent desires (epithymiai), and represents the virtuous soul as one characterized by harmony and order, which requires the restraining of desire […] The Protagoras, by contrast, denies the reality of acrasia and thus implicitly denies the existence of good-independent desires.”

2. (alt-of, alternative, countable, uncountable)Alternative spelling of akrasia (“(uncountable) lack of physical or (especially) mental strength; poor willpower; also, the tendency to act contrary to one's better judgment; (countable) an instance of this”)

   “What I think this depicts is a relationship between the reasons we have to act and the action we do. This problem of acrasia suggests that sometimes we have those reasons. We think smoking is bad for health so the action we would expect is that we would refrain from smoking. Instead, we smoke.”

   “So when the badness of a poor doctor or actor is said to be 'similar by analogy' to badness proper[…], and this is used to shed light on the 'similarity' between acrasia proper and the acrasias in respect of anger, honour, and gain[…], the thought must be that a bad doctor stands to doctoring more or less as a bad man stands to action, while a choleric acratic stands to anger more or less as an acratic proper stands to bodily pleasure.”

   “Augustine's original interpretation of our human condition is that we struggle and fail to do what we want to do and know that we ought to do – the classical problem of weakness of will or acrasia. […] We recognize acrasia in ourselves […] it is an acrasia which is tied to specific weaknesses: the man who yearns for vodka, and who tries and fails to limit his vodka-intake, may have no serious difficulty in avoiding over-eating.”

   “Socrates undertakes to press this indictment against that explanation of acrasia which he takes to be by far the most common of all: that men who know the better will do the worse because they are "overcome" or "defeated" by desire for pleasures.”