Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept (...) of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will. (shrink)

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 (...) from a causal modeler’s perspective the only possibility to get both requirements consists in subscribing to reductive physicalism and indeterminism. (shrink)

In this article, we will identify two issues that deserve greater attention from those researching lay people’s attitudes to moral responsibility and determinism. The first issue concerns whether people interpret the term “moral responsibility” in a retributive way and whether they are motivated to hold offenders responsible for pre-determined behaviour by considerations other than retributivism, e.g. the desires to condemn the action and to protect society. The second issue concerns whether explicitly rejecting moral responsibility and retributivism, after reading about determinism, (...) would have any impact on “implicit” retributivism when recommending a sentence for a hypothetical offender. We will report the results of an exploratory study that investigated these questions. Our preliminary findings raise the possibility that a significant proportion of participants either i) may not interpret “moral responsibility” in the basic, retributive sense of the term, which is at issue in the determinism debate, or ii) may be unconsciously motivated by non-retributive considerations to judge that the offender is morally responsible, in the basic, retributive sense. If this is confirmed by future research, a wider implication would be that theorists’ arguments against retributivism are more likely to affect public attitudes to punishment when non-retributive ways of achieving important punishment goals are emphasised. Our preliminary findings also suggested that explicit retributivism did not correlate with implicit retributivism. If this is confirmed in future research, it would imply that free will theorists who wish to affect public attitudes toward punishment should, when communicating their research to the public, give detailed consideration to the implications for sentencing. (shrink)

I argue that free will is a nominal construct developed and deployed post hoc in an effort to provide cohesive narratives in support of a priori moral-judgmental dispositions. In a reversal of traditional course, I defend the view that there are no circumstances under which attributions of moral responsibility for an act can, should, or do depend on prior ascriptions of free will. Conversely, I claim that free will belief depends entirely on the apperceived possibility of moral responsibility. Orthodoxy dictates (...) an agency-first thesis, according to which free will is necessarily antecedent to moral responsibility. However, I present a number of arguments against this view, and in favor of an agency-last stance, according to which the concept of free will is dependent upon that of moral responsibility. I provide further support for my case in the form of new empirical evidence regarding the stable mode of inference used to attribute free will across moral contexts. These experimental results can be interpreted to imply the deflation of one of the longest-standing veridical paradoxes in experimental philosophy. Furthermore, the sole conceptual scheme found to be capable of modeling the experimental results is also capable of illuminating several classic works in the analytic philosophy of moral agency. (shrink)

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 (...) free will from objective experiments. The phenomenon of free will is modelled with a deterministic decision making agent. The agent values ‘independence’ and satisfies a desire for independence by responding to ‘challenges’. When the agent generates challenges internally it will establish a record of being able to do otherwise. In principle a computer could be built with a free will property. The model also explains false attributions of free will (superstitions). (shrink)

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 (...) so with certainty. Examining intuitions of prosociality, future-orientation, learning, meaningfulness, human uniqueness, and well-being, ratings were highest in the indeterministic universe condition and lowest in the deterministic universe condition, both significantly different from the uncertain universe condition. Participants’ free will beliefs had only weak impact on realism, happiness, and learning intuitions, but did not reverse the general intuition favoring indeterminism, and showed no impact on other intuitions. (shrink)

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 (...) uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n. (shrink)

Neuroscience is increasingly used to infer the cognitive capacities of offenders from the activity and volume of different brain regions, with the resultant findings receiving great interest in the public eye. This field experiment tested the effects of public engagement in neuroscience on attitudes towards offenders. Brainstorm is a play about teenage brain development. Either before or after watching this play, 728 participants responded to four questions about the age of criminal responsibility, and the moral responsibility and dangerousness of a (...) hypothetical young or adult offender. After watching the play, participants perceived the young offender as less likely to reoffend than the adult offender and the young, but not adult, offender as less morally responsible for his actions, especially on the first offence. Therefore, public engagement in the newest arrival to the criminological scene – neuroscience – may shift support for different youth justice responses. (shrink)

If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...) to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome. (shrink)

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 (...) moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality. (shrink)

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 (...) cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes. (shrink)

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 (...) in a deterministic universe. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people's judgments about whether a behavior was compatible with determinism were not predicted by their judgments about whether that behavior relies on physical processes in the brain and body, is uniquely human, is unpredictable, or involves reasoning. Experiment 3, however, found that a distinction between what we call “active” and “passive” behaviors can explain people's judgments. Experiment 4 extended these findings, showing that we can measure this distinction in several ways and that it is robustly predicted by two different cues. Taken together, these results suggest that people carve up mentally guided behavior into two distinct types—understanding one type to be compatible with determinism, but another type to be fundamentally incompatible with determinism. (shrink)

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 (...) intuitions. (shrink)

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of (...) surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility. (shrink)

In the debate on free will and moral responsibility, Saul Smilansky is a hard source-incompatibilist who objects to source-compatibilism for being morally shallow. After criticizing John Martin Fischer’s too optimistic response to this objection, this paper dissipates the charge that compatibilist accounts of ultimate origination are morally shallow by appealing to the seriousness of contingency in the framework of, what Paul Russell calls, compatibilist-fatalism. Responding to the objection from moral shallowness thus drives a wedge between optimists and fatalists within the (...) compatibilist camp. (shrink)

Most people believe in free will. Whether this belief is warranted or not, free will beliefs are foundational for many legal systems and reducing FWB has effects on behavior from the motor to the social level. This raises the important question as to which specific FWB people hold. There are many different ways to conceptualize free will, and some might see physical determinism as a threat that might reduce FWB, while others might not. Here, we investigate lay FWB in a (...) large, representative, replicated online survey study in the US and Singapore, assessing differences in FWB with unprecedented depth within and between cultures. Specifically, we assess the relation of FWB, as measured using the Free Will Inventory, to determinism, dualism and related concepts like libertarianism and compatibilism. We find that libertarian, compatibilist, and dualist, intuitions were related to FWB, but that these intuitions were often logically inconsistent. Importantly, direct comparisons suggest that dualism was more predictive of FWB than other intuitions. Thus, believing in free will goes hand-in-hand with a belief in a non-physical mind. Highlighting the importance of dualism for FWB impacts academic debates on free will, which currently largely focus on its relation to determinism. Our findings also shed light on how recent scientific findings might impact FWB. Demonstrating physical determinism in the brain need not have a strong impact on FWB, due to a wide-spread belief in dualism. (shrink)

Expert opinions have yielded a wide and controversial assortment of conceptions of free will, but laypersons seem to associate free will more simply with making choices. We found that the more strongly people believed in free will, the more they liked making choices, the higher they rated their ability to make decisions (Study 1), the less difficult they perceived making decisions, and the more satisfied they were with their decisions (Study 2). High free will belief was also associated with more (...) spontaneous associating of choice with freedom, and with the perception of actions as choices. Recalling choices (Study 3) and making choices (Study 4) led to a stronger endorsement of the belief in free will, with an additional effect for the level of choice involved. These findings suggest that the everyday social reality of beliefs about free will is a matter of how people think and feel about choice. (shrink)

This paper starts by introducing a tripartite conception of responsibility for health consisting of a moral agent having moral responsibilities and being held responsible, that is blamed, for failing to meet them and proceeds to a brief discussion of the nature of the blame, noting difficulties in agency and obligation when the concept is applied to health‐threatening behaviours. Insights about the obligations that we hold people to and the extent of their moral agency are revealed by interrogating our blaming behavior, (...) and to facilitate this, my own blaming attitudes and actions are analysed in respect of an imagined adult son who seeks thrills by jumping from a pier into the sea, an activity common around coastlines and intended to be analogous in varying degrees to a range of health‐threatening behaviours. I consider my responses to this imagined act in relation to some features of moralism, the excess of morality, concluding that blame can be justified when it is proportionate and within interpersonal relationships. There is evidence that some nurses hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients considered to have caused or contributed to their illness, but this is not justified, not only because of impaired agency, but also because if there is responsibility for health, associated obligations are owed to those who share our lives, and it is those people who are entitled to hold individuals responsible. Nurses who hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients are invited to identify the status of moral agency, the precise natures of their (failed) obligations, and of the patient–nurse relationship. It is concluded that reflection on these matters and the difference between justified blame and moralism demonstrates that blaming behaviour in the context of professional health care is built on nothing stronger than prejudice. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as they (...) recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

After a long time, people are still debating over “Cartesian-like Dualism” (CLD), i.e. towards the separation of “res-extensa” from “res-cogitans”. Since we suspect that this is due to a general attraction of mind towards the darkness of metaphysics, we have investigated the mental origin of this attraction. In human mind, we can envisage three different functional levels emerging one from the other like in a Matrioska; the three levels cause the arousal of as many forms of “dualisms”: 1) The 1st-level (...) corresponds to the “Dual-state” of mind, an archetypic dualism made of Unconscious Mind (UM, the domain of biophysical/biochemical signals) and Conscious Mind (CM, the domain of thoughts, images and sounds), genetically committed to reciprocal and fruitful interactions. 2) the 2nd-level corresponds to “Double-perspective” dualism; it emerges from CM’s splitting into two opposite perspectives: the 1st-order perspective (1PP) (subjective, emotional, Self-oriented, etc.) and the 3rd-order perspective (3PP) (rational, objective, Self-detached, etc.), that are in psychological contraposition. During individual growth, Ego-sense installs in CM with the illusion of possessing FW, and dominates 1PP. Conversely, 3PP is typically interested in scientific argumentations and investigations; so, 3PP confutes 1PP’s convictions on scien-tific bases (e.g. 1PP’s conviction that the binomial Ego-FW is real). Yet, on the one hand, 3PP hasn’t got a scientific alternative to explain “who we really are”, on the other hand, 1PP exhibits a great success in everyday life cognition. Then, we necessarily step over the dualism of the 3rd-level, “Cartesian-like Dualism” (CLD). The emotional origin of this CLD holds back 1PP’s trick to claim its supremacy over 3PP. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while those of the second kind are processed by an abstract cognitive system. The (...) current paper reports the results of three studies exploring whether or not considerations about possible future consequences of holding an agent responsible at a present time affect people’s judgments of responsibility. The results obtained suggest first that the concrete system does not produce compatibilist judgments of responsibility unconditionally, even when facing appropriately mechanistic, reductionistic, emotionally loaded and concretely worded deterministic scenarios. Second, these results suggest that considerations about possible future consequences for innocent third parties that may follow as a result of holding an agent responsible affect people’s judgment as to whether or not the agent is responsible for what she did. Finally, it is proposed that these results compliment extant evidence on the so-called “Side-effect effect”, as they suggest that emotional reactions toward possible future side effects influence people’s judgment of responsibility. The impact of these results for philosophy and moral psychology is discussed. (shrink)

This article identifies a novel challenge to standard understandings of responsibility practices, animated by experimental studies of biases and heuristics. It goes on to argue that this challenge illustrates a general methodological challenge for theorizing about responsibility. That is, it is difficult for a theory to give us both guidance in real world contexts and an account of the metaphysical and normative foundations of responsibility without treating wide swaths of ordinary practice as defective. The general upshot is that theories must (...) either hew more closely to actual practice than they appear to, or they must provide some normative foundation for responsibility that does not go through actual practice. (shrink)

The mind when posing the question “what is consciousness?” (i.e. “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”, THPOC) will encounter an unsurmountable conflict of interest. The hope that by investigating the “neural correlates to consciousness” (NCCs) one might come to a “scientific (conceptual)” definition of consciousness is then paradoxical. In fact, the investigation of NCCs might unveil only “operational” (functional) properties of the mind. Nevertheless, the pieces of information deriving from these investigations seem to be striking. To this respect, there is a (...) growing evidence of a dual-state activity in mind, corresponding to the activities of a conscious (explicit) mind (C) and an unconscious (implicit) mind (U), respectively; moreover, C and U do not share any conceptual connection with psychoanalytic Conscious and Unconscious. In detail, C is the domain where thoughts (as well as images and music) can be managed; instead, U exhibits a biophysical/biochemical activity. In order to communicate with each other, a transduction of one language into the other must reciprocally occur; it is notable that the investigation of NCCs leads to the conclusion that it is right that transduction process accounts for the unsurmountable question about THPOC. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the dual state activity in mind stands on a probabilistic-deterministic mechanism; this functional property of the mind is incompatible with the existence of free-will (FW) but not with C’s FW illusion. In summary in the current literature, there is a unique cognitive model that is compatible with all these evidences, i.e. “The Bignetti Model” (TBM). (shrink)

Two experiments report on the construction of the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS), a new measure for quantifying alterations to agency. In Experiment 1, 370 participants completed a preliminary version of the scale following hypnosis. Factor analysis revealed two underlying factors: Involuntariness and Effortlessness. In Experiment 2, this two factor structure was confirmed in a sample of 113 low, medium and high hypnotisable participants. The two factors, Involuntariness and Effortlessness, correlated significantly with hypnotisability and pass rates for ideomotor, challenge (...) and cognitive items. Twelve week test-retest correlations showed that Involuntariness was highly stable, but Effortlessness only moderately stable. Analysis of the combined datasets from Experiments 1 and 2 showed both SOARS scores were significantly related to the derived factors of Woody, Barnier, and McConkey's (2005) 4-factor model of hypnotisability. This scale clarifies conceptual confusion around agentive action and provides empirical support for a multifactorial account of sense of agency. (shrink)

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses (...) for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas. (shrink)

Payment to recruit research subjects is a common practice but raises ethical concerns relating to the potential for coercion or undue influence. We conducted the first national study of IRB members and human subjects protection professionals to explore attitudes as to whether and why payment of research participants constitutes coercion or undue influence. Upon critical evaluation of the cogency of ethical concerns regarding payment, as reflected in our survey results, we found expansive or inconsistent views about coercion and undue influence (...) that may interfere with valuable research. In particular, respondents appear to believe that coercion and undue influence lie on a continuum; by contrast, we argue that they are wholly distinct: whereas undue influence is a cognitive distortion relating to assessment of risks and benefits, coercion is a threat of harm. Because payment is an offer, rather than a threat, payment is never coercive. (shrink)