Against Willpower

My book, Against Willpower: Self-Control, Agency, and Society, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Self-control’s haves and have-nots

A substantial body of research indicates that health and wealth come to those with good self-control. Yet, the notion of self-control’s haves and have-nots –– the notion that some people just have more ‘willpower’ than others –– is not just a source of disempowerment for those who think themselves the have-nots in this equation: it is a falsehood that produces failures of self-control by obscuring what self-control is and how we can foster it in ourselves and others.

Self-control is a skill

Against Willpower rejects conceptions of self-control difficulties as individual failures and argues they are a societal problem instead: culture, policy, and language shape access to the strategies and behaviors that constitute self-control. It shows the shortcomings of conceptions of self-control as a ‘willpower muscle’ or, more broadly, a discrete mental faculty. Instead, the book draws on the social model of dis/ability to show that self-control is a basic agentive capacity constituted by a set of behavioral strategies: it can be realized in multiple ways, some of which rely on different neurocognitive processes than others. Talk of ‘willpower’ obscures forms of self-control that are not heavily reliant on mental effort, such as situational and construal-based self-control strategies. These strategies would be a better fit, e.g., for neurodivergent people with executive functioning limitations.

Barriers shape access to self-control

Against Willpower offers a new theory of individual differences in self-control: the Access Theory of Self-Control, according to which self-control is produced and undermined by cultural, built, and programmed barriers to specific self-control behaviors. Misled into thinking of self-control as a mental muscle, some of us are better at forms of self-control than we give ourselves credit for, whereas others never learn self-control strategies that would be a good fit for them. Against Willpower includes discussion of the consequences of these barriers for ADHD and neurodiversity, intergenerational poverty, and criminology. By working to remove barriers to self-control, we can move towards a society that fosters self-control for all.

Who is the book for?

While this is an academic monograph, it is written with the non-specialist reader in mind. The book is intended for interdisciplinary academic audiences (across disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, special education, medical humanities, and social science), students, and anyone with serious interests in philosophical questions surrounding psychology and human agency.

When will it come out?

The book will be part of OUP’s Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society series. I’ll update this site soon with more information – stay tuned!