Q&A: Weakness of Will
Weakness of Will
Question
Can the process called weakness of will be defined as follows:
A person has the option of eating pork and the option of not eating it, and on the basis of all the considerations (religious belief in this case) he decides not to eat it, and that is essentially his will.
He decides to act in accordance with his will and not eat.
Then he reaches a third stage: the actual difficulty of not eating the pork (he is standing in front of the pork and suddenly really experiences the difficulty of not eating it). He had not calculated this difficulty beforehand (at most he estimated that there would be some difficulty, but he did not estimate that it would be so strong).
Then comes the stage in which he weighs what is more precious in his eyes: the divine command or the fulfillment of his craving, and he chooses to satisfy his craving and eats the pork.
At the moment when he ate the pork, the value of satisfying his craving was more precious in his eyes.
And after he has devoured the pork and satisfied his craving, the desire to keep the divine command once again returns to center stage, and again, as in stage one, he thinks that the difficulty of not eating pork is not so great, and he regrets not having chosen not to eat the pork. Is this definition correct, or is it lacking?
Answer
It is completely lacking, because that is exactly the description that creates the difficulty. There is no process of repentance here, only a change of values that happens on its own. Earlier he preferred the pleasure over keeping Jewish law, and now it has reversed. Beyond that, the question is: how did the reversal happen? At the moment he regrets it, his values are already aligned, so why is there still any need to repent? He has already changed. And in general, who is the one who changed: the bearer of the earlier values or the current ones?
Discussion on Answer
And I am again saying that you are describing, not explaining. Weakness of will, by definition, means that I want one thing and do another. That is exactly what you are describing. But that is only a description of what is called weakness of will, not an explanation of the difficulty.
There is an objection to this description, and that is what creates this philosophical-psychological problem, and as I said, you have not answered it.
The objection assumes that a person does not do something he does not want. And if he failed, that means this is what he really wanted (he prefers the pleasure or avoiding dealing with the difficulty over the desire to observe Jewish law). Alternatively, if he did it against his will, then apparently there was something that forced him to do so. If so, he was under duress, and again there is no need to repent. You have not answered that.
The core of the argument is that when a person is before the actual choice, he is detached from the actual difficulty and only estimates the difficulty he is going to experience, but the difficulty he actually experiences at the moment of action is greater, and at that moment he freely chooses comfort (eating pork).
After the act, the person regrets not having chosen the divine command, and in fact he decides that he did not choose correctly at the practical stage—in other words, he decides that the value of the divine command is more precious than the value of eating the pork together with the difficulty that he has already experienced and is aware of.
The person has in fact changed, and he is a newly repentant person criticizing his mistaken decision (which according to his opinion now seemed proper then), regretting it, confessing, and accepting upon himself not to do it again in the future (it is possible that he will not succeed, because once again he may not properly assess the difficulty).