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  1. Fully Caused and Flourishing? Incompatibilist Free Will Skepticism and Its Implications for Personal Well-Being.Stephan Tegtmeier - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (1):149-166.
    Previous research associates free will skepticism with adverse well-being effects. However, it is doubtful that skeptical participants in these studies disbelieved in the incompatibilist notion of what it means to have free will. This is one of the first studies to exclusively examine such skeptics. A sample of 167 participants who claimed to believe that there is no free will responded to an online survey. After examining whether participants in fact disbelieved in the incompatibilist concept, they were asked to describe (...)
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  • (1 other version)Free Will, Control, and the Possibility to do Otherwise from a Causal Modeler’s Perspective.Gerhard Schurz, Maria Sekatskaya & Alexander Gebharter - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1889-1906.
    Strong notions of free will are closely connected to the possibility to do otherwise as well as to an agent’s ability to causally influence her environment via her decisions controlling her actions. In this paper we employ techniques from the causal modeling literature to investigate whether a notion of free will subscribing to one or both of these requirements is compatible with naturalistic views of the world such as non-reductive physicalism to the background of determinism and indeterminism. We argue that (...)
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  • Consider the tumor: Brain tumors decrease punishment via perceptions of free will.Alec J. Stinnett & Jessica L. Alquist - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (1):162-185.
    Two experiments tested the hypothesis that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will. Experiment 1 found that a brain tumor decreased punishment for criminal behavior by decreasing perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s free will. This effect was stronger for liberal and non-religious participants than for conservative and religious participants. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and additionally found that a brain tumor decreased perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s conscious decisions and true self, thereby decreasing perceptions of his free (...)
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  • Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedom.Claire Simmons, Paul Rehren, John-Dylan Haynes & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2022 - Consciousness and Cognition 101:103318.
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • A Defense of Natural Compatibilism.Florian Cova - forthcoming - In Joe Campbell, Kristin Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Free Will. Blackwell.
    In this chapter, I survey the experimental philosophy literature on folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. I argue that the hypothesis that folk are natural compatibilists is a better fit and explanation of existing data than the hypothesis that folk are natural incompatibilists. I discuss the use of 'Throughpass' measures in the recent literature (arguing that these measures are inadequate) as well as experimental philosophers' reliance on mediation analysis and structural equation modelling to infer causality (arguing that this (...)
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  • Freedom and chance.Mark Wulff Carstensen - unknown
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  • Constrained Choice: Children's and Adults’ Attribution of Choice to a Humanoid Robot.Teresa Flanagan, Joshua Rottman & Lauren H. Howard - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13043.
    Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children's and adults’ attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and (...)
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  • Beyond the Courtroom: Agency and the Perception of Free will.Edouard Machery, Markus Kneer, Pascale Willemsen & Albert Newen - 2023 - In Samuel Murray & Paul Henne (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action. Bloomsbury.
    In this paper, we call for a new approach to the psychology of free will attribution. While past research in experimental philosophy and psychology has mostly been focused on reasoning- based judgment (“the courtroom approach”), we argue that like agency and mindedness, free will can also be experienced perceptually (“the perceptual approach”). We further propose a new model of free will attribution—the agency model—according to which the experience of free will is elicited by the perceptual cues that prompt the attribution (...)
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  • A Rationalist Defence of Determinism.Michael A. Istvan - 2020 - Theoria 87 (2):394-434.
    Largely due to the popular allegation that contemporary science has uncovered indeterminism in the deepest known levels of physical reality, the debate as to whether humans have moral freedom, the sort of freedom on which moral responsibility depends, has put aside to some extent the traditional worry over whether determinism is true. As I argue in this paper, however, there are powerful proofs for both chronological determinism and necessitarianism, forms of determinism that pose the most penetrative threat to human moral (...)
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  • Legal decision-making and the abstract/concrete paradox.Noel Struchiner, Guilherme da F. C. F. De Almeida & Ivar R. Hannikainen - 2020 - Cognition 205 (C):104421.
    Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called ‘abstract/concrete paradox’ also jeopardizes the consistency (...)
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  • Exceptionalist naturalism: human agency and the causal order.John Turri - 2018 - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71 (2):396-410.
    This paper addresses a fundamental question in folk metaphysics: how do we ordinarily view human agency? According to the transcendence account, we view human agency as standing outside of the causal order and imbued with exceptional powers. According to a naturalistic account, we view human agency as subject to the same physical laws as other objects and completely open to scientific investigation. According to exceptionalist naturalism, the truth lies somewhere in between: we view human agency as fitting broadly within the (...)
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  • Folk intuitions and the conditional ability to do otherwise.Thomas Nadelhoffer, Siyuan Yin & Rose Graves - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (7):968-996.
    In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference (...)
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  • Natural Compatibilism, Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics.Thomas Nadelhoffer, David Rose, Wesley Buckwalter & Shaun Nichols - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (8):e12873.
    The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Free Will, Control, and the Possibility to do Otherwise from a Causal Modeler’s Perspective.Alexander Gebharter, Maria Sekatskaya & Gerhard Schurz - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1889-1906.
    Strong notions of free will are closely connected to the possibility to do otherwise as well as to an agent’s ability to causally influence her environment via her decisions controlling her actions. In this paper we employ techniques from the causal modeling literature to investigate whether a notion of free will subscribing to one or both of these requirements is compatible with naturalistic views of the world such as non-reductive physicalism to the background of determinism and indeterminism. We argue that (...)
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  • On Libertarianism as an Explanatory Hypothesis.Andrew Kissel - 2019 - Southwest Philosophy Review 35 (2):91-110.
    Recently, several libertarian philosophers have argued that we appear free on the basis of widespread experience, and that this appearance justifies believing that we enjoy libertarian free will (e.g. Pink 2004 and Swinburne 2013). Such arguments have a long history in philosophy but have been easily dismissed on one of two grounds: either the appearance of freedom does not exist, or else it is an illusion. In this paper, I argue that although presentations of the argument have been historically inadequate, (...)
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  • Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Robust Across Demographic Differences.Joshua Knobe - 2019 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 56 (2):29-36.
    Within the existing metaphilosophical literature on experimental philosophy, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the claim that there are large differences in philosophical intuitions between people of different demographic groups. Some philosophers argue that this claim has important metaphilosophical implications; others argue that it does not. However, the actual empirical work within experimental philosophy seems to point to a very different sort of metaphilosophical question. Specifically, what the actual empirical work suggests is that intuitions are surprisingly robust (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy and moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 494–516.
    Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of judges (...)
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  • What is blame and why do we love it?Mark D. Alicke, Ross Rogers & Sarah Taylor - 2018 - In Kurt Gray & Jesse Graham (eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology. Guilford. pp. 382.
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  • Free will evolved for morality and culture.Andrew E. Monroe, Kathleen D. Vohs & Roy F. Baumeister - 2005 - In Arthur G. Miller (ed.), The Social Psychology of Good and Evil. Guilford Publications.
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  • If free will doesn't exist, neither does water.Manuel Vargas - 2013 - In Gregg D. Caruso (ed.), Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp. 177-202.
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  • The Making of Might-Have-Beens: Effects of Free Will Belief on Counterfactual Thinking.Jessica L. Alquist, Sarah E. Ainsworth & Roy Baumesiter - 2014 - Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41 (2):268-283.
    Counterfactual thoughts are based on the assumption that one situation could result in multiple possible outcomes. This assumption underlies most theories of free will and contradicts deterministic views that there is only one possible outcome of any situation. Three studies tested the hypothesis that stronger belief in free will would lead to more counterfactual thinking. Experimental manipulations (Studies 1-2) and a measure (Studies 3-4) of belief in free will were linked to increased counterfactual thinking in response to autobiographical (Studies 1, (...)
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  • A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism.Ivar Hannikainen, Gabriel Cabral, Edouard Machery & Noel Struchiner - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 70:251-259.
    The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal (...)
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  • (1 other version)Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention.Tamler Sommers - 2014 - In Levy Neil & Clausen Jens (eds.), Handbook on Neuroethics. Springer. pp. 273-286.
    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 (...)
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  • Recent research on free will: Conceptualizations, beliefs, and processes.Roy Baumeister - 2014 - Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 50:1-52.
    This chapter summarizes research on free will. Progress has been made by discarding outmoded philosophical notions in favor of exploring how ordinary people understand and use the notion of free will. The concept of responsible autonomy captures many aspects of layperson concepts of free will, including acting on one's own (i.e., not driven by external forces), choosing, using reasons and personal values, conscious reflection, and knowing and accepting consequences and moral implications. Free will can thus be understood as form of (...)
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  • Switch on Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health.Caroline Leaf - 2013 - Baker Books: Baker Books.
    According to researchers, the vast majority--a whopping 75-98 percent--of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of our thought life. What we think about truly affects us both physically and emotionally. In fact, fear alone triggers more than 1,400 known physical and chemical responses in our bodies, activating more than thirty different hormones! Today our culture is undergoing an epidemic of toxic thoughts that, left unchecked, create ideal conditions for illnesses. Supported by current scientific and medical research, (...)
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  • Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism.Cory J. Clark, Bo M. Winegard & Roy F. Baumeister - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:397001.
    For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. (...)
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  • How To Think About Philosophical Methodology.Jennifer Nado - 2017 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3):447-463.
    Experimental philosophy, at least in its ‘negative’ variety, has standardly been portrayed as presenting a dramatic challenge to traditional philosophical methodology. As such, it has prompted a large variety of counter-arguments and defenses of intuition. In this paper, I argue that many of these objections to experimental philosophy rest on various oversimplifications that both experimental philosophers and their opponents have made regarding intuitions and philosophical methodology. Once these oversimplifications are abandoned, I argue that the experimentalist critique of current philosophical methods (...)
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  • A deterministic model of the free will phenomenon.Mark Hadley - 2018 - Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research 8 (1):1-19.
    The abstract concept of indeterministic free will is distinguished from the phenomenon of free will. Evidence for the abstract concept is examined and critically compared with various designs of automata. It is concluded that there is no evidence to support the abstract concept of indeterministic free will, it is inconceivable that a test could be constructed to distinguish an indeterministic agent from a complicated automaton. Testing the free will of an alien visitor is introduced to separate prejudices about who has (...)
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  • Laypersons’ beliefs and intuitions about free will and determinism: new insights linking the social psychology and experimental philosophy paradigms.Gilad Feldman & Subramanya Prasad Mgmt Chandrashekar - 2018 - Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (9):539-549.
    We linked between the social-psychology and experimental-philosophy paradigms for the study of folk intuitions and beliefs regarding the concept of free will to answer three questions: (1) what intuitions do people have about free-will and determinism? (2) do free will beliefs predict differences in free-will and determinism intuitions? and (3) is there more to free-will and determinism than experiencing certainty or uncertainty about the nature of the universe? Overall, laypersons viewed the universe as allowing for human indeterminism, and they did (...)
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  • Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
    Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics (...)
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  • Thought Experiments in Experimental Philosophy.Kirk Ludwig - 2017 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 385-405.
    Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that (...)
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  • Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds.Edouard Machery - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors, such as the analysis of concepts.
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  • How Should Free Will Skeptics Pursue Legal Change?Marcelo Fischborn - 2017 - Neuroethics 11 (1):47-54.
    Free will skepticism is the view that people never truly deserve to be praised, blamed, or punished for what they do. One challenge free will skeptics face is to explain how criminality could be dealt with given their skepticism. This paper critically examines the prospects of implementing legal changes concerning crime and punishment derived from the free will skeptical views developed by Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso. One central aspect of the changes their views require is a concern for reducing (...)
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  • Compatibilism can be natural.John Turri - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 51:68-81.
    Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had (...)
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  • What kinds of alternative possibilities are required of the folk concept(s) of choice?Jason Shepard & Aneyn O’Grady - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 48:138-148.
    Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a choice. The experiments indicate that the (...)
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  • Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Christian Miller (eds.) - 2017 - MIT Press.
    Philosophers have discussed virtue and character since Socrates, but many traditional views have been challenged by recent findings in psychology and neuroscience. This fifth volume of Moral Psychology grows out of this new wave of interdisciplinary work on virtue, vice, and character. It offers essays, commentaries, and replies by leading philosophers and scientists who explain and use empirical findings from psychology and neuroscience to illuminate virtue and character and related issues in moral philosophy. The contributors discuss such topics as eliminativist (...)
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  • Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken: A reply to Feltz and Millan.James Andow & Florian Cova - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (4):550-566.
    In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...)
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  • Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cognition.John Turri - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):403-424.
    Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental moral philosophy.Mark Alfano, Don Loeb & Alex Plakias - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:1-32.
    Experimental moral philosophy emerged as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, as a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi) approach. Experimental moral philosophy is the empirical study of moral intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Like other forms of experimental philosophy, it involves gathering data using experimental methods and using these data to substantiate, undermine, or revise philosophical theories. In this case, the theories in question concern the nature of moral reasoning and judgment; the extent and sources (...)
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  • Origination, Moral Responsibility, Punishment, and Life-Hopes: Ted Honderich on Determinism and Freedom.Gregg Caruso - 2017 - In Gregg D. Caruso (ed.), Ted Honderich on Consciousness, Determinism, and Humanity. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
    Perhaps no one has written more extensively, more deeply, and more insightfully about determinism and freedom than Ted Honderich. His influence and legacy with regard to the problem of free will—or the determinism problem, as he prefers to frame it—looms large. In these comments I would like to focus on three main aspects of Honderich ’s work: his defense of determinism and its consequences for origination and moral responsibility; his concern that the truth of determinism threatens and restricts, but does (...)
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  • Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will.Gregg Caruso - 2012 - Lexington Books.
    This book argues two main things: The first is that there is no such thing as free will—at least not in the sense most ordinary folk take to be central or fundamental; the second is that the strong and pervasive belief in free will can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness.
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  • What Do People Find Incompatible With Causal Determinism?Adam Bear & Joshua Knobe - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (8):2025-2049.
    Four studies explored people's judgments about whether particular types of behavior are compatible with determinism. Participants read a passage describing a deterministic universe, in which everything that happens is fully caused by whatever happened before it. They then assessed the degree to which different behaviors were possible in such a universe. Other participants evaluated the extent to which each of these behaviors had various features. We assessed the extent to which these features predicted judgments about whether the behaviors were possible (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy of actual and counterfactual free will intuitions.Adam Feltz - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 36 (C):113-130.
    Five experiments suggested that everyday free will and moral responsibility judgments about some hypothetical thought examples differed from free will and moral responsibility judgments about the actual world. Experiment 1 (N = 106) showed that free will intuitions about the actual world measured by the FAD-Plus poorly predicted free will intuitions about a hypothetical person performing a determined action (r = .13). Experiments 2–5 replicated this result and found the relations between actual free will judgments and free will judgments about (...)
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  • Experimental Philosophy, Robert Kane, and the Concept of Free Will.J. Neil Otte - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 3 (1):281-296.
    Trends in experimental philosophy have provided new and compelling results that are cause for re-evaluations in contemporary discussions of free will. In this paper, I argue for one such re-evaluation by criticizing Robert Kane’s well-known views on free will. I argue that Kane’s claims about pre-theoretical intuitions are not supported by empirical findings on two accounts. First, it is unclear that either incompatibilism or compatibalism is more intuitive to nonphilosophers, as different ways of asking about free will and responsibility reveal (...)
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  • Free will eliminativism: reference, error, and phenomenology.Gregg D. Caruso - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2823-2833.
    Shaun Nichols has recently argued that while the folk notion of free will is associated with error, a question still remains whether the concept of free will should be eliminated or preserved. He maintains that like other eliminativist arguments in philosophy, arguments that free will is an illusion seem to depend on substantive assumptions about reference. According to free will eliminativists, people have deeply mistaken beliefs about free will and this entails that free will does not exist. However, an alternative (...)
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  • Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis.Adam Feltz & Florian Cova - 2014 - Consciousness and Cognition 30 (C):234-246.
    Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a metaanalysis (...)
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  • Experimental Philosophy and the Compatibility of Free Will and Determinism: A Survey.Florian Cova & Yasuko Kitano - 2014 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 22:17-37.
    The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the existing empirical evidence seems to support the view that most people have compatibilist (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Philosophy of Freedom.Lars Svendsen - 2014 - Reaktion Books.
    "Freedom of speech, religion, choice, will - - humans have fought, and continue to fight, for all of these. But what is human freedom, and what are the main threats to it today? These questions and more are discussed in this comprehensive investigation of the nature of freedom in contemporary society. Our behaviours, thoughts and actions are governed by a variety of restrictions, deadlines and burdens. Taking a broad approach across metaphysics, politics and ethics, A Philosophy of Freedom questions how (...)
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  • On the very concept of free will.Joshua May - 2014 - Synthese 191 (12):2849-2866.
    Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support (...)
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