This high-quality volume of essays, edited by leading philosopher of action Alfred Mele, provides a thorough overview of a variety of key issues revolving around the philosophy and psychology of self-control. Self-control – to be distinguished in the first instance from related notions such as self-regulation or self-management – is, broadly speaking, the capacity to exercise control over one’s actions in the face of distractions and impulses. The agent who successfully acts upon their best intention to walk to and from the local shop for a pint of milk is exercising self-control, while the agent who acts against their better intentions – and can’t help but stop off for a pint of beer on the way – is not. Procrastination, addiction, and temptations of various stripes are among the familiar enemies of self-control.  

We are living in an age of constant distraction, so the volume feels very timely. What is self-control? How can we exercise it? What prevents us from doing so? Although largely theoretical in tone, most of the writers here have half an eye on the practical implications for society and for individuals (examples of habitual smartphone use, detoxing and dieting abound). The title ‘Surrounding Self-Control’ presumably refers to the volume’s panoramic scope, which doesn’t just address issues directly related to the nature of self-control, but also examines its implication elsewhere: how it relates to clinical addiction, self-regulation, temporal self-management, moral responsibility, legal culpability and much else besides. The book is divided into four sections, which I shall now briefly review in turn. 

The first (and most substantial) section discusses the nature of self-control – what it is and how it works. The chapters address different aspects of the nature of self-control, including the role of emotions (Scarantino), narratives (Griffith), ego depletion and willpower (Baumeister, Vonasch and Sjåstad), cross-cultural variations in understanding of self-control (Wente et al), the brain mechanisms involved in inhibitory control (Sel and Shepherd) and the relation between self-control and decision-making (Herdova and Kearns). We also get an intriguing – and at times quite personal – appendix to his chapter by Roy Baumeister on the replication crisis in Social Psychology, an ongoing controversy in which Baumeister’s own work on willpower has played a central part. 

The central theme running through this section is a rejection of the prevailing ‘divided mind’ paradigm for understanding self-control. Although visible to varying degrees in most of the chapters in this section, this revisionary project comes out most clearly in Sklar and Fujita’s “Self-Control as a Coordination Problem” and Mylopolous and Pacherie’s “Self-Control as a Hybrid Skill”. The ‘divided mind’ paradigm has a long history that can be traced back to Ancient Greece, especially Aristotle, and it, or variants of it, remains the dominant paradigm to this day (sometimes under the label of ‘dual-process models’). At its root is the claim that the human mind is composed of two competing elements or systems: a cool, conscious calculating system of the rational self on the one hand, and a hot, inconstant, automatic system of a more reactive sub-part of the self on the other. This divided mind picture then lends itself to the idea that self-control is a matter of the rational part somehow keeping the usurping, reactive sub-part in its bidding. Nevertheless, as many of the authors point out, this picture is hard to substantiate for two main reasons. First, it is not clear that the mind can be so neatly divided into two systems; emotions, for instance, which are often thought to be a central element of the ‘hot’ usurping sub-part of the self, actually have a far wider role to play than this. They can be seen, for instance, to play a part in generating and preserving one’s ‘rational’ plans (Scarantino, p.137, uses the example of how the emotion of love can generate, structure and preserve one’s rational plans). Second, even if we were to accept the Divided Mind model as a model of the mind in general, it is not altogether obvious that it should then lend itself to the ‘usurping’ picture of self-control that is standardly painted. As Mylopoulos and Pacherie point out it is quite easy to rationalise and confabulate reasons for acting in ways that are against one’s better interests. 

How, then, should we understand self-control if not by the ‘Divided Mind’ paradigm? The key chapters here suggest the same underlying idea: self-control is not so much about one part of the mind acting against the competing impulses of another, but, rather, a matter of keeping different motivations, aims and intentions of the self in harmony with each other. Sklar and Fujita call this ‘coordination’. As they put it: “Rather than reflect competition between opposing elements, we propose that self-control reflect a coordination problem…self-control can be understood structurally as a whole versus part problem” (p. 70-71). Likewise, Mylopoulos and Pacherie argue that “if we restrict the scope of self-control to motivational conflicts, then we fail to account for failures of practical rationality […] Instead what is needed is an account of self-control that explains how executive and automatic control processes coordinate and interact”. This they call a ‘hybrid skill’ that involves the “honing and fine-tuning of different types of interactive control strategies” (p. 95). 

Where the first section focuses most keenly on the ‘control’ side of ‘self-control’, the second section of the book puts more emphasis on the ‘self’ side. As Funkhoser and Veilleux put it “Self-control is an issue only for those that have a sense of self and who care about the form it takes” (p. 222). The chapters in this section share a concern with how self-knowledge feeds into self-control via self-management, self-monitoring and self-regulation. Rigoni et al discuss the role that metacognitive beliefs have on the capacity to exercise self-control in the face of temptations and ‘inappropriate behavioural tendencies’. Drawing on some of their own psychological research, they outline how placebos (in this case placebo brain-stimulations on unwitting participants wearing scalp-attachments) lead to a greater sense of agency and control, as well as observable behavioural changes in forms of self-control under test conditions. Funkhouser and Veilleux, meanwhile, discuss two distinct types of mindsets towards temptations: acceptance (i.e., accepting disfavoured desires or emotions as part of oneself) and alienation (i.e., rejecting disfavoured desires or emotions as part of oneself). They initially hypothesised that acceptance would lead to more effective self-control than alienation partially because the former (intuitively at least) involves a more healthy mind-set than the latter, which hints at repression, denial, defeatism and struggle (p. 208). In fact, as they go on to outline, the results of their studies end up being a little more mixed than this – suggesting a more complex story – although they conclude that, on balance, “alienation is counterproductive” as a strategy against, say, addiction, since framing one’s situation as a ‘choice’ rather a ‘struggle’ means that one does not have to forcibly resist the temptation, but just to choose against it (p. 222). We see here – in both these studies – how deeply intertwined metacognitive self-understanding is with the capacity for self-control.

The other two chapters in this section share a concern with the flip-side of this: how a lack of self-regulation, integration and self-control can lead to mental ‘disintegration’ (Debus, p. 234) or ‘fragmentation’ (Nanay, p. 246). Debus argues for both the instrumental and intrinsic value of mental self-regulation – what she describes as a capacity to shape one’s own mental life – and outlines how it can be achieved in a ‘primitive non-reflexive way’: that is to say, for Debus, it is part of the skill of maintaining a healthy mind to, all else being equal, maximise coherence and integration in one’s values, plans and actions, and that part of this skill is to exercise self-control in the face of distractions. Nanay’s chapter – drawing on a wide range of empirical literature – argues that over the course of our life we often tend to become more ‘fragmented’ since we change more than we are willing to admit, meaning that our desires and emotions can shift while our self-image remains fairly static. This can lead to a sense of fragmentation – e.g., desires that conflict with our self-image – that is better dealt with, he argues, by avoiding rather than resisting temptations (i.e., using our capacities for self-governance to avoid finding ourselves in situations where we are forced to have to resist temptations). 

These ideas have direct relevance in the second half of the book (sections 3 and 4), where the scope widens to take in social, legal and ethical elements. Given space constraints it’s not possible to review all of these chapters – although there is much to learn from each of them – but I shall pick out two of the highlights and explain their connection to the preceding ideas. 

Hawley’s chapter (‘Achieving Goals by Imposing Risk’) is a rich and nuanced discussion of the various ways in which social accountability – for instance, promising, contracting, predicting and intending in the presence of others – can be effective tools of self-regulation and self-control, thus adding another layer to the kind of project that Debus was exploring in her chapter of ‘shaping one’s mental life’. For instance, I can increase my chances of losing weight if I promise to join a friend for a weekly bike ride. The promise generates an obligation on my part that then leads to a strengthening of self-control in pursuit of that goal, since – in addition to the mere motivation to keep my promises – I also want to preserve a reputation for reliability, and, just generally, avoid the embarrassment of dropping out. But, effective as this strategy might be for self-control, Hawley argues that we should recognise it has moral limits when it risks harming others: if social accountability generates obligations strong enough to motivate, then, by the same token, a failure to carry out those obligations will present some kind of harm (e.g., leaving my riding partner in the lurch). We are therefore putting others at risk by using this strategy, and, as Hawley notes “there is something ethically dubious about the way in which we create risk in order to be able to mitigate it, and thereby achieve our goal” (p. 290). 

While Hawley’s chapter begins by asking how our sense of morality – or social accountability – can feed into and help strengthen self-regulation and self-control, Shoemaker’s intriguing chapter (‘Empathic Self-Control’) moves in the opposite direction and asks how self-control feeds into moral responsibility. He’s particularly interested in taking up a suggestive but relatively underexplored connection between empathy and self-control that is visible in some psychological studies, particularly relating to psychopathy (psychopaths have considerably lower impulse control than non-psychopaths, see pp. 384-385). Shoemaker argues that, in addition to the two standard notions of self-control – volitional self-control and rational self-control – each of which has a role to play in morally responsible behaviour, there is a third notion of self-control without which we cannot get a proper grip on our practices of moral responsibility (i.e., our practices of praise and blame). This is the capacity for empathic control. So, whereas it is important to form the right attitudes in the face of competing motivations (rational control) and to carry out the right actions in the face of competing motivations (volitional control), it is only by understanding another’s point of view – either cognitively or emotionally – that we can be fully responsive to the needs and interests of others (what Shoemaker calls ‘pure regard’). If I am not able to “see facts about another’s interests as that person sees them” (cognitive empathy) or come to take up “another’s perspective as a feeling, emotional creature” (emotional empathy) then I will lack the grounding for the kind of consideration and sensitivity that is necessary for a properly responsive relationship with others (pp. 391-392). Empathic control – a form of self-control and self-management – is a capacity that “enables one to perceive some of what one’s evaluative commitments demand that one perceive” (p. 393). Indeed, as Shoemaker goes on to argue, it is this very capacity for empathic control, which, when turned on one’s own future self, might help account for why there is such a strong connection between self-control and morally responsive behaviour. 

In all, this is a wonderful collection of papers that will undoubtedly help shape the study of self-control for many years to come. It is, of course, essential reading for any researchers working in this area, within both philosophy and psychology. But it will also be of interest to researchers working in other areas (public policy, sociology, or law, for instance) who are interested in how and why we often act against our best interests, and what barriers, tactics, mind-frames and social structures we can put in place to help better take control of our lives. 

Michael Wilby, Anglia Ruskin University

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: self-control, philosophy