Weakness of Will Is Not a Biological Condition
Weakness of Will Is Not a Biological Condition
The medicalization of human nature has unwelcome consequences.
There is nothing more important than the trivial, as Sherlock Holmes well knew. The smallest indications often (though not always) have the widest implications. One should always be on the lookout for deeper significance while, of course, guarding against paranoia and the siren song of conspiracy theory.
There are perhaps few things more trivial than letters to the British Medical Journal, but they sometimes suggest something important. My attention was captured by a recent letter headed “Weight ‘regain’ is not neutral language.”
The authors, from Buenos Aires and Düsseldorf, objected to the use of the word “regain” in an article in a previous edition of the journal in which it was pointed out that when people stop taking the new weight-loss wonder drugs, they often put on weight again. The authors write:
Weight regain after stopping medication is often interpreted as failure rather the expected course of a chronic condition. The term “regain” encapsulates this stigma, shifting responsibility from biology to personal inadequacy.
At least the authors agree with me that the usage of a word or a few words can reveal philosophical presuppositions.
Now in a sense, everything that humans do is biological, since we are biological organisms. But it seems to me that there is an important and philosophically significant difference between a wholly biological organism, say an amoeba, and a human. Once you have described the biology of an amoeba, there is not much left to say about it. I do not think that once you have described all the neurochemical discharges in the brain of a human, there is nothing left to say about that human’s behavior.
With regard to this letter, let me take the example of a near neighbor of mine, in his mid-80s. He was overweight, had Type 2 diabetes, and was taking metformin to counteract it. Unfortunately, he did not feel well.
He took the decision to change both what he ate, and how much he ate. He lost weight, his diabetes disappeared, and he felt (and looked) much better. Would it be to stigmatize him adversely to say that he had taken responsibility for himself, and that his efforts were laudable?
Weakness of will is part of the human condition. I doubt whether there is anyone living who has never suffered from or displayed it on occasion. Moreover, an iron-willed person is not necessarily very attractive as a human type.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that the abundance of food and the marketing of convenient, highly processed products that offer swift gratification of appetite make weakness of will both all the more disastrous and all the more necessary to overcome.
This has gone further in Anglo-Saxon countries than elsewhere, perhaps because there is little in the way of culinary tradition that in other places offers more resistance to the attractions of junk food. But the tendency is by no means limited to Anglo-Saxon countries: The conditions of modern life conduce surrender to the line of least resistance.
Sociological and physiological correlates of human conduct not doubt sometimes explain such conduct adequately (if a man’s behavior changes drastically from usual, and he is subsequently found to have a tumor in his frontal lobe, we do not look further for explanation); they may often provide mitigating circumstances for behavior that is undesirable in some way. But note that there is an asymmetry between our explanation of bad and good behavior. No one says of a very good or kind person that his goodness or kindness is merely biological, and that it is wrong to shift the praise from biology to personal adequacy.
At the heart of the letter writers’ philosophy is the view that human beings are intrinsically flawless and their failings are caused only by adverse circumstances exterior to themselves. This seems generous and tolerant, because it absolves them of all blame: and there is nothing as nasty as blame.
It is true that this attitude avoids censoriousness, the easy, categorical, immediate, and unthinking (but emotionally gratifying) resort to adverse criticism, which is a most unattractive quality. But if the cost of avoiding censoriousness is to turn human beings into the physiological automata that this letter seems to think desirable, the cost is too high. Blame and censoriousness are not identical.
The authors implicitly believe that to blame someone for his situation is automatically to withdraw all sympathy from him, as if it were possible to sympathize only with perfect persons. Obviously, such paragons don’t exist, at least to all appearances. But the imperative to be sympathetic is very great: Nobody wants to be thought unsympathetic. The solution is therefore to attribute all their imperfections to something other than themselves. They are not behaving weakly, they are ill. And no one can be blamed for his own illness.
But no one who adopts the views of the writers of this letter conceives of himself in the way the authors conceive of people who put on weight after they stop taking weight-reducing drugs. Thus, that person divides humanity into two, those who are agents and act of their own volition, and those who are feathers on the wind of circumstance, whose conduct it is always wrong to attribute to anything other than raw biology. I need hardly point out that there is a considerable element of both grandiosity and narcissism in this.
If this attitude were adopted fully, it would require clinicians to tell patients that there was literally nothing that they could do to ameliorate their condition. They should not even try to limit the amount that they ate, or alter their diet, because that would be to suggest first that they had some responsibility in the matter, and second that if they failed to do so, they would be potentially subject to reproach, and might even reproach themselves—which, of course, would be psychologically damaging.
For myself, I have always sympathised with the weak of will, because they so much resemble me, though in some things they may take weakness of will a little further than I take mine. And surely we all wish that we had sometimes behaved differently from how we did behave, having surrendered to weakness of will. If there is anyone who has never felt this—well, I wouldn’t like to meet him.
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