1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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themselves think, but rather a doctrine they are advancing in the first person. Socrates
makes this clear a few lines later:
you [Protagoras] know that the many (hoi polloi tôn anthrôpôn) will not be
persuaded by me and by you, but they say that most people (pollous) are
unwilling (ouk ethelein) to do what is best, even though they know (gignôskontas)
what it is and are able to do it, but act otherwise’ (352d4-7, my trans. modifying
Lombardo and Bell)
It is easy to elide hoi polloi and pollous here: easy, but mistaken. For it is significant that
‘the many’ (hoi polloi, as agents in the nominative case) do not assert that they
themselves act akratically. Rather they assert that ‘most people’ (pollous, as objects in the
accusative case: I will continue to distinguish the two groups as hoi polloi and pollous
even when having to use these Greek terms ungrammatically) do so. Even if one holds
that the extensions of hoi polloi and pollous must logically overlap (since both refer to a
majority), so that the many may indeed be speaking about themselves (as is borne out
when Socrates enjoins them to visit the sophists for instruction (357e: a passage flagged
earlier and to be discussed later), it is crucial that hoi polloi are not avowing akrasia but
rather describing it. They are speaking not in the first-person but in the third. Indeed
there is a double distancing here. Protagoras (who is the real focus of the discussion) is
not made himself to avow akrasia, but is rather shown its refutation via the refutation of
the many; and the many themselves are not made to avow it but are rather made only to
describe it in the putative actions of those they describe as pollous.
The double distancing of akrasia bears out Moran’s contention discussed above,
that it is impossible to avow akrasia when speaking as a responsible practical agent. 16
One can describe and even predict one’s own akratic actions, but one does so in a
theoretical mode which fails to affect the sense in which as a practical agent one cannot
intend to act akratically. This is why, as Moran explains, Sartre calls such predictions
‘bad faith’. 17 Akrasia is in this perspective – a perspective which the double distancing in
the Protagoras reveals to be Platonic as well as that of the practical turn in the modern
philosophy of self-knowledge – is not a failure of the will to dominate agency but a