This Field Required: Poverty and Virtue Ethics

Here’s an interesting blog posting by Pamela Stubbart, exploring the implications of a concept that’s being talked about quite a bit in psychology and some in ethics:  will-power depletion.  The general idea is that each human being has, at any given time, a certain amount of willpower — capacity to stick to or follow through on a difficult decision or action, also, in the older ethical literature, known as “self-control” — on reserve, and it can be exhausted as it gets used over time making decisions.

There have been some empirical psychological studies, which seem to indicate — you should always be rather skeptical of “studies show… ” until you’ve looked carefully at how the study was carried out and what reasoning the researchers employed — that there is something to this idea of “willpower depletion.”  And, this in turn has some implications for those in poverty:

the less money you have, the more sit­u­a­tions you will encounter in which you must restrain your­self and make dif­fi­cult pur­chas­ing trade­offs, and this means you’ll have less willpower left­over later to deal with other sit­u­a­tions in which you might need it