The last chapter summarizes the book’s main findings and advances three policy recommendations, two of which transcend the issue of self-control and apply to politics and government more generally: • Behavioral science must have a much stronger position at the policymaking table. The current practice of installing “Behavioral Insight Teams” by governments around the world does not go nearly far enough, and can even be seen as an obstacle to real change. • The need for considering three epistemological standpoints (see Chapter 8) means that our “regulatory condition” is one of imperfection and brokenness. We need more room for what Aristotle called epieikeia: the rectification of the law as an expression of the highest form of justice. One of the reasons for epieikeia may be limited self-control. • Due to both the long-term social changes discussed in Chapter 7, the demands of self-control have become too exacting for substantial parts of the population. The book’s final and most urgent conclusion is that prevailing political views and public policies are based on beliefs about self-control that are simply false. A more fair and just society requires a relaxation of these views and policies.

The concept of equity is often assimilated with that of Aristotelian epieikeia, a process that corrects rules when their application to a certain case would be unjust or contrary to the intention of the legislator. In the middle ages - while theologians had written at length on the concept of epieikeia - glossators, commentators, and canonists adopted a concept of aequitas completely unrelated to it. This barrier between law and theology lasted throughout the medieval period. By the mid-sixteenth century the concept of epieikeia had become familiar to legal writers and, through the work of humanist jurists, was explicitly associated with aequitas. The introduction of epieikeia in legal scholarship opened the door to the influence of scholastic theology over the concept of equity, as lawyers and theologians worked together to build a novel concept of aequitas/epieikeia as judicial power to interpret law beyond its letter.