Joseph, then, appears to have acted, freely and intentionally, contrary to his better judgment.
And people sometimes give in to their urges, contrary to their better judgment.
Pelops' son Atreus was the father of Pleisthenes who, contrary to the better known genealogy, was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.
Contrary to the better performance shown by males in the baseline, women showed larger aftereffects once the prisms were removed.
Contrary to expectations, better sleep continuity indexed by shorter WASO was found in men who developed PTSD compared to men who did not develop the disorder.
You must act contrary to your present better judgment in order to exhibit akrasia; conflict with a previous better judgment does not indicate akrasia, but merely a change of mind.
But our reactions to (1), (2), and (3) show that we do think there is something peculiar about action contrary to one's better judgment which renders such action hard to understand, or perhaps even impossible.
In an outstandingly lucid and stimulating essay published in 1999 (see also his 2009, ch. 4), Richard Holton argued that weakness of will is not action contrary to one's better judgment at all.
Weakness of will as the untutored understand it is not akrasia (if we reserve that term for action contrary to one's better judgment), but rather a certain kind of failure to stick to one's plans.[15] This understanding of weakness of will changes the subject in two ways.
1. Until section 3.3 of this essay, where I discuss some revisionist doubts about understanding weakness of will as action contrary to one's better judgment, I will follow the tradition in using the expression "weakness of will" to refer to the phenomenon I have just described.
