I don't often share this kind of thing on the Gravitas blog, but I thought this one was worth an exception — partly because it's genuinely relevant to students, and partly because it gives you a sense of how I think.

The piece below is an adapted version of a paper I wrote for an undergraduate Philosophy of Mind course at McGill University in Montreal. The course asked us to tackle a deceptively simple question: why, when we have made a decision, do we so often fail to follow through on it? The paper earned a 96% and the highest grade in the class. Which is, I will admit, partly why I'm sharing it.

If you've ever wondered whether the tutors at Gravitas actually know what they're talking about when it comes to the rigour of academic work — well. Here is some evidence.

The original was a formal philosophical submission, so I've made it more readable without changing any of the underlying ideas. The argument still stands as I wrote it. I've just removed some of the scaffolding.

Why You Keep Getting Distracted: A Philosophical Account of Temptation

We all have a story we tell about temptation. The folk version, borrowed loosely from Judeo-Christian imagery and refined by Hollywood, involves an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Freud had his own version: the conscious versus the unconscious. The ancient Greeks phrased it as the intellect in conflict with the appetites.

What all these accounts share is an assumption: that giving in to temptation requires the mind to be divided. That somewhere inside you, a part of you wants one thing and another part wants something else, and the wrong part won. Philosophers call this 'mental partitioning'.

I want to argue that this assumption is mistaken. Or at least, that it isn't necessary for a satisfying account of how temptation works. And the alternative I'll offer, I think, is considerably more useful.

Two Types of Temptation

Let me introduce a character. Call her S. S has decided to spend the evening in the library finishing her final term paper. This decision isn't arbitrary — it sits inside a rational chain. She wants to flourish. She believes that submitting an excellent term paper will contribute to that. That the paper feeds into her degree, her degree into her career, her career into the life she wants.

Now: what kinds of things might derail her?

First, let's set aside the irrelevant cases. S's plans might be disrupted by a power cut, or by genuinely forgetting she had made them. These don't puzzle us. They don't tell us anything interesting about the psychology of self-control.

What's also, perhaps surprisingly, irrelevant is the case where S reasonably changes her mind. If a fire breaks out in the library, S should leave. That's not a failure of will. It's a rational revision of her plan in light of new information.

Type 1: Temptation to Unreasonably Revise

The interesting case is this. S is sitting in the library. Her friends text her. They're at the pub. She knows, in some clear-eyed sense, that going to the pub is not going to help her finish her paper, submit her degree, or flourish. And yet she goes.

This is what I call temptation to unreasonably revise. It's a genuine case of weakness of will — acting against one's own better judgement in a way that is incoherent with one's overall goals. If you asked S afterwards, she would probably feel guilty. She'd say she knew she was making the wrong call. There's something paradoxical about it: she seemed, simultaneously, to want to stay and to want to leave.

This is the case that the angel-and-devil story is trying to explain. And it's the case I'll return to when I examine whether the 'divided mind' theory actually works.

Type 2: Temptation to Ineffectiveness

The second type is different — and more common than most people realise.

S stays in the library. She doesn't go to the pub. She has, in every obvious sense, followed through on her decision. And yet at the end of the evening she has barely written a word. She reformatted her bibliography. She cleaned her keyboard. She walked to the café for a coffee. She spent half an hour comparing citation management software. She used the bathroom twice.

At no point did S decide not to write her paper. She never explicitly revised her intention. She simply... didn't do it. This is temptation to ineffectiveness — and it doesn't obviously involve self-deception at all. S wasn't lying to herself. She was just being ineffective.

These are importantly different phenomena, and they require different explanations.

Does a Divided Mind Explain Either of Them?

The classic account — mental partitioning — says that inside each of us there are distinct mental sub-systems or 'parts', each with their own goals and desires. When S goes to the pub, it's because the part of her that wanted to socialise 'won' against the part that wanted to finish her essay.

There are two serious versions of this view.

Mental parts as rational agents. On this account, each mental sub-part is a mini-agent — capable of reasoning, strategising, and even 'whispering' persuasively in order to pull your behaviour in its preferred direction. This is basically the devil-on-your-shoulder picture formalised.

The problem is that it generates a regress. If S can be 'in two minds', why can't each of those minds also be in two minds? You end up with an infinite stack of tiny agents inside agents, which explains nothing. Defenders of the view might say that the sub-agents feel unified from the inside — but the mere fact that we can't imagine a sub-agent having its own sub-agents doesn't mean it doesn't. This ontology collapses under its own logic.

Mental parts as interdependent goal structures. A more sophisticated version says the parts aren't rational agents but structured, semi-permanent clusters of beliefs, desires, and attitudes — each with its own internal gravity, as it were. When S goes to the pub, the 'socialising cluster' simply exerted more gravitational pull than the 'essay cluster'.

This is more plausible-sounding, but it has two problems. First, it's explanatorily empty. If these mental structures are present in all of our behaviour all the time, saying they 'explain' why S went to the pub adds nothing. It doesn't tell us why the socialising cluster won on this occasion. The mechanism is simply restated, not explained. Second, it's not clear that these 'structures' are genuinely distinct mental parts, rather than just a description of the ordinary, unified mind's landscape of competing concerns.

Both versions fail. And if they fail, the 'divided mind' account doesn't actually explain why S went to the pub. The more honest answer, I'd suggest — and here I follow Sartre — is that S simply changed her mind, and must take responsibility for that.

The Interesting Case: Explaining Ineffectiveness

The more practically interesting problem is the second type of temptation — the endless reformatting and coffee trips and keyboard cleaning.

This doesn't involve self-deception. So why does it happen?

My answer is what I call the necessary flexibility theory.

Consider what S's decision to 'work in the library all night' actually requires of her in practice. The phrase is surprisingly vague. What counts as 'working'? Googling a definition — work, or distraction? Checking your notes from last week's lecture — work, or avoidance? The answer depends on judgment exercised in the moment, and no set of rules S could give herself in advance would cover every case.

Suppose S tries to constrain herself with rules:

• I won't leave my chair.

• I won't talk to anyone.

• I won't navigate away from my document.

• I won't take my hands off my keyboard.

On the surface, this seems like a sensible strategy. But it creates two insurmountable problems.

First, no rule can be absolute. What if her energy is genuinely so low that a coffee would make the next two hours significantly more productive? What if she needs to ask a classmate about a source? What if she needs to scratch her nose? Every rule will have legitimate exceptions, and S knows it. So every rule demands constant, 'on the fly' evaluation of whether this is one of those legitimate exceptions. And that evaluation is exactly where ineffectiveness sneaks in.

Second, trying to close the gaps by adding more rules only makes things worse. Rule 45: do not look away from the screen. Rule 46: do not think about anything other than the essay. The more exhaustive the list becomes, the more obviously impossible it is to follow, and S knows that too. A framework she knows she cannot follow is a framework she will approach as breakable from the start.

Ineffectiveness, then, is not a failure of self-control in the strong sense. It is not self-deception. It is an inevitable consequence of the fact that any complex task requires ongoing judgment, and judgment creates space for drift.

This, incidentally, is why 'just try harder' is such poor advice. It misdiagnoses the problem. The solution is not stricter rules but better, more realistic structures — which is a rather different thing.

What This All Means

To pull the threads together:

There are two genuinely distinct types of temptation. The first — abandoning your plan to do something you know is against your interests — does involve something paradoxical and difficult. But it doesn't require a divided mind to explain it. It requires an honest account of how we change our minds, and of moral responsibility.

The second — being present but ineffective — doesn't involve self-deception at all. It is a structural feature of how complex tasks work. No mind, divided or otherwise, is to blame. The task itself resists the kind of rigid rule-following that would prevent drift.

Understanding the difference matters — especially for students in the middle of a long revision period, who often mistake one for the other and apply entirely the wrong remedy.

Original paper:

• Lyhne-Gold, A.., 'A Philosophical Account of Temptation', submitted for PHIL 342: Philosophy of Mind, McGill University, 2024.

Sources:

• Evnine, S.J., 'Mental Partitioning', Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood (Oxford, 2008);

• Henden, E., 'Weakness of will and divisions of the mind', European Journal of Philosophy 12(2);

• Schwenkler, J., 'How Temptation Works', Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (forthcoming).