Abstract
This chapter reviews and then criticizes the dominant approach that experimental philosophers have adopted in their studies on free will and moral responsibility. Section “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will” reviews the experimental literature and the shared approach: probing for intuitions about the so-called compatibility question, whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Section “The Intervention” argues that this experimental focus on the compatibility question is fundamentally misguided. The critique develops in the form of a dialogue: a staged “intervention” for an experimental philosopher who works on free will. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the literature can move in a more fruitful direction.
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Notes
- 1.
See my “In Memoriam: The X-Phi Debate” on why there is no reasonable debate over this general question.
- 2.
See Sommers (2010, 2012) for two examples.
- 3.
An experiment by Roskies and Nichols (2008), although not designed explicitly to test the effect of psychological distance, supplies further evidence of its influence The authors predicted that intuitions about free will and moral responsibility would be sensitive to whether deterministic scenarios are described as actual, in our world, or merely possible (true in some other possible world). In the “alternate condition,” the description of determinism is the same, except that the universe the subjects are asked to consider is not our own. The subjects then respond to similar probes about free will and moral responsibility in this alternate universe. Consistent with the authors’ hypothesis, the assignments of free will and moral responsibility were significantly higher in the actual condition than in the alternate condition.
- 4.
Monterrosso et al. (2005), to their credit, do not discuss determinism. Instead, they vary the percentages of people with a particular condition—psychological or physiological—who go on to commit crimes.
- 5.
Eddy Nahmias objects that the “had to happen” language in this description begs the question against compatibilist analyses of choice. His studies do not employ this description.
- 6.
- 7.
The transfer of non-responsibility principle, roughly speaking, is that we cannot be morally responsible for an act if we are not morally responsible for any of the determining factors of that act. (The non-responsibility for the determining factors “transfers” to the act itself). See Fischer and Ravizza (1998) for a more precise formulation. The Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) is the principle that an agent can only be morally responsible for an action if they had the capacity to act otherwise.
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Sommers, T. (2015). Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention. In: Clausen, J., Levy, N. (eds) Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4_118
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