Akrasia ; Greek , "lacking command" or "weakness", occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy, is listed as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgment. The adjectival have is "akratic".
The problem goes back at least as far as Plato. In Plato's Protagoras Socrates asks exactly how this is the possible that, if one judges action A to be the best course of action, one would create anything other than A?
In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" 358d. whether a person examines a situation & decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the advantage course, i.e. man's natural goal. An all-things-considered assessment of the situation will bring full knowledge of a decision's outcome in addition to worth linked to well-developed principles of the good. A person, according to Socrates, never chooses to act poorly or against his better judgment; and, therefore, actions that go against what is best are simply a product of being ignorant of facts or knowledge of what is best or good.
Aristotle, on the other hand, took a more empirical approach to the question, acknowledging that we intuitively believe in akrasia. He distances himself from the Socratic position by locating the breakdown of reasoning in an agent’s opinion, not his appetition. Now, without recourse to appetitive desires, Aristotle reasons that akrasia occurs as a written of opinion. opinion is formulated mentally in a way that may or may not imitate truth, while appetites are merely desires of the body. Thus, theory is only incidentally aligned with or opposed to the good, making an akratic action the product of opinion instead of reason. For Aristotle, the antonym of akrasia is enkrateia, which means "in power" over oneself.
The word akrasia occurs twice in the Matthew 23:25 1 Corinthians 7:5. In another passage Rom. 7:15–25 Paul, without actually using the term akrasia, seems to character the same psychological phenomenon in study the internal clash between, on the one hand, "the law of God," which he equates with "the law of my mind"; and "another law in my members," included with "the flesh, the law of sin." "For the improvement that I would do, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." v.19
In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, book II, Acrasia, the embodiment of intemperance dwelling in the "Bower of Bliss", had the Circe-like capacity of transforming her lovers into monstrous animal shapes.