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Abstract
Much psychological research has been conducted on the phenomenon of procrastination and the related problem of impulse control. It is only in recent years, however, that philosophers have turned their attention to this phenomenon. One question of recent philosophical interest in this area is the question of whether procrastination is an instance of weakness of will. In particular, Sarah Stroud has recently argued that procrastination is not weakness of will. In this paper, it will be shown that the main force of Stroud's argument lies in ones accepting a key assumption of traditional accounts of weakness of will, namely, the assumption that acting against ones best judgment is always irrational. A formal denition of procrastination will then be proposed. Building on this denition, it will then be shown that that at least some cases of procrastination are cases in which the agent acts rationally against her best judgment. Besides explaining why procrastination cannot be subsumed under traditional accounts of weakness of will, these cases also show that rational action against ones best judgment is possible, validating a view nascent in recent moral psychology and action theory.