Free Irrationality in Moral Choices

This paper explores the question of whether an agent can freely and willfully act against her all-things-considered best judgment. I construct the case of an agent acting against the demands of impartial morality that give her decisive reason to act, without compromising her full agential power and strong will. I call this her demonstration of free irrationality and distinguish it from the accounts of weakness of will and volitional necessity. The questions are whether there is a kind of non-rational motivational force strong enough to cause us to act irrationally, and whether an action motivated by such force is compatible with our exercise of full agential power. I offer one possible explanation: the strongest and deepest commitments central to our lives and personal characters may motivate us to act contrary to our rational judgments. Then the questions are whether it is possible for such strongest commitment not to give us decisive reason to act, and whether we can still act on that commitment, knowing that it does not give us decisive reason to act. I conclude that if such a case were possible, then it would show that our exercise of agency does not always solely depend on our rationality and that the former can be dissociated from the latter, at least on some rare and extreme occasions.