Suppose two people are trying to quit smoking. They both want a
cigarette, but they wish they didn’t want a cigarette. So there
is a difference between what they want and what they metawant.
Now, suppose one of the two people smokes a cigarette. Does that
mean that the person who smoked had less willpower? If somebody
does not do something that they have a first order desire to do
and a second order desire to abstain from, this could be viewed
as an example of willpower. However, we do not know how strong
their first order desire was. In the above example, perhaps the
person who smoked had a much stronger first order desire to
smoke, but they both had an equal second order desire to not
smoke. Did the smoker really have less willpower? Denote by W
(for ‘want’) the level of first order desire that a person has
to take some action. Denote by MW (for ‘metawant’) the level of
second order desire to not take the action. We could roughly
think of the decision to take the action or not as determined by
whether MW>W.