Self-control, Attention, and How to Live without Special Motivational Powers
Sebastian Watzl
Abstract
This chapter provides an account of self-control and shows that attention has a central and indispensable role in all mental agency. The chapter challenges a dominant trend across recent work in psychology and philosophy that explains self-control in terms of special motivational powers, such as willpower or a division between a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. Watzl argues that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, he suggests, self-control illustrates the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. Watzl holds that it is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. Attention is important for self-control because attention is an agential capacity by which agents can actively couple or decouple an intention, preference, or desire to and from action. Self-control, Watzl holds, is thus achieved through a complex set of attentional skills. He calls this ’the re-prioritization account of self-control’. Self-control thus indicates a behavioural flexibility or freedom that attention weaves into the structure of all agency. For this reason, any account that explains agency only in terms of motivational and representational states is incomplete.