Akrasia

[4] If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal.

An all-things-considered assessment of the situation will bring full knowledge of a decision's outcome and worth, linked to well-developed principles of the good.

A person, according to Socrates, never chooses to act poorly or against his better judgment and, therefore, actions that go against what is best are simply a product of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good.

[11] Donald Davidson (1917–2003) attempted to answer the question by first criticizing earlier thinkers who wanted to limit the scope of akrasia to agents who despite having reached a rational decision were somehow swerved off their "desired" tracks.

Indeed, Davidson expands akrasia to include any judgment that is reached but not fulfilled, whether it be as a result of an opinion, a real or imagined good, or a moral belief.

Psychologist George Ainslie argues that akrasia results from the empirically verified phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting, which causes us to make different judgements close to a reward than we will when further from it.

[13] The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins,[14] even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell.

[18] Encouraged by Rousseau, there was a rise of what Arnold J. Toynbee would describe as "an abandon (ακρατεια)...a state of mind in which antinomianism is accepted – consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice – as a substitute for creativeness".