Self-restraint

This point parallels the objection to the "cop at your shoulder" standard sometimes invoked in discussions of criminal responsibility. That the accused would have resisted if they had had that kind of incentive is supposed to show that they possessed powers of self-restraint sufficient for legal responsibility. Similarly, if you knew your drug taking was subject to immediate punishment, then you would have had a certain kind of reason to abstain. If that knowledge would have led you to abstain, then you are at least minimally responsive to reasons.17 My objection is that the counterfactual incentive might be compulsive as well. 

We deliberately avoided the use of some elegant constructions as WHILE. .. WEND structure, SWAP statement, ON ERROR condition and never broke up a single statement into several lines. Although this self-restraint implies that we had to give up some principles of structural programming (e.g., we used more GOTO statements than it was absolutely necessary), we think that the loss is compensated by the improved portability of the programs. 

IN the state of nature - a fictitious state much discussed by phOosophers and somewhat reminiscent of the island in Wil liam Golding s Lard of the Flies - people live in the present and care only about themselves. As a result, their lives, in Hobbes s memorable phrase, are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." No known societies are quite like that. The Ik of Uganda, as described by a social anthropologist who stayed with them for some time, are probably as close to the state of nature as any human group on record, but even they display minimal forms of self-restraint. A major task of the social sciences is to explain why we are not in the state of nature. Here I shall consider foresight - the ability to be motivated by long-term consequences of action - as a possible explanation of self-restraint. Other explanations are discussed later. ... 

Both nature and society put serious restraints on everyone. Survival in the real world demands cautious self-restraint, and first of all, laborious creation of new knowledge about the physical world, natural laws, and society with significant practical consequences. Such knowledge can only be obtained by tedious observation and a never-ending testing of facts. It is obvious that... 

X I believe that intelligent self-interest, conscientious self-restraint, and sympathetic identification with others would engender less inclination to hatred than traditional religious teachings based on the promise of redemption through the sacrifice of scapegoats. 

We have heard about your moderation and self-restraint, but 1 think that there is no nation more excitable and stupid than you are. We, the Arabs, are (all) equal (to each other). We do not enslave each other, except if someone fights against the other [and is taken prisoner). 1 thought you treated your people as equals as we do. Instead of what you (2275) did, it would have been better if you had informed me that... 

The power of self-restraint (Gandalf resists taking the ring)... 

The dassical mechanics of the first three sections of Chapter 1, the riaiatical thermodynamics of Chapter 2, and the statistical mechanics of the first four sections of this chapter all have one feature in common— the discussion is strictly confined to equilibrium states of matter that can, at least in principle, be studied in the laboratory. The first breadi in this position of self-restraint came when J. Hiomson (1871) and van der Waals (1873) suggested that Andrews s experiments on the continuity of state made it reasonable to discuss the properties of fiuids whose densities were between those of the orthobaric gas and liquid. These states played a key role in the development of the theories of surface tension of Rayleigh (1892) and, more important, of van der Waals (1893). The later quasi-thermodynamic work of Chapter 3 shows how fruitful it has been to postulate the existence of thermodynamic functions sudi as the free energy for values of their arguments other than those that describe the state of equilibrium. 

As explained above, ethanol is essentially a cenhal nervous system (CNS) depressant dmg although mesolimbic dopamine neurones display increased activity. The effect in this latter case may be through inhibition of an inhibitory pathway. Generally however, alcohol depresses higher cortical function which in turn leads to a sense of relaxation, a loss of self restraint and uninhibited behaviour. This initial effect is followed by progressively increasing depression of all neuronal activity. Higher mental functions mediated by areas like the frontal cortex... 

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