Mixed Thinking about Free Will & Responsibility There is a well-known mystery surrounding free will (to use van Inwagens term): acting freely seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. Now thats a serious problem! Heres a way to illustrate it. Suppose determinism is true and youre deciding whether to commit some crime, say embezzlement. Given how things have gone before and the nature of the world youre in, only one option is possible. Lets suppose you embezzle. To many, especially incompatibilists, this seems to preclude freedom and responsibility since, in an important sense, you couldnt have done otherwise. You lack any real options; embezzlement was inevitable. But now suppose determinism is false so that you have a robust sense of options. Then which action you perform seems partly a matter of luck. Your embezzlement wont entirely be determined by the kind of world youre in or the past leading up to the act, but that includes your character, preferences, deliberation, knowledge, etc. Compatibilists often like to press on this point, insisting that the right kind of control over ones action is what really matters. This mystery rears its ugly head among both philosophers and ordinary folks. The debates among philosophers seem to lead to dialectical stalemates (to use Fischers phrase) between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Each camp seems equally confident that one of their preferred factors is or is not a necessary condition for free will, and they cant argue otherwise without begging the question against their opponents. Among non-specialists, there are similarly mixed results. Some data suggest ordinary thinking is compatibilist while others suggest it is incompatibilist. What gives? Im interested in acquiring a better understanding of the nature and source of the above mystery, but it is affected by existing research on which position is more intuitive. Many have tried to discount intuitions on one side or the other or to treat the issue as resting on a mere verbal dispute. But I provide experimental evidence for an alternative account in a new paper---On the Very Concept of Free Will (PDF). I argue that our ordinary attributions of acting freely are affected by factors emphasized by both sides of the debate and that neither can be tossed out as an error. I propose a cluster theory that treats the concept of free will as non-classical, along the lines of a prototype account. Heres a quick sense of the data. I systematically varied two factors (which I label liberty and ensurance), each of which is tied to the kind of options and control, respectively, highlighted in debates about free will. The data fit the following predictions: When both factors are present, people are highly inclined to attribute freedom to the protagonist of the vignette. When both factors are absent, people are inclined to deny freedom. But, when only one is present, responses on average are near the midpoint. And each of these factors have an independent and significant impact on responses. Id love to hear what others think about this apporach to the mystery, as well as how it fits with the complicated and burgeoning amount of data on this topic in experimental philosophy. My hope is that such a theory can go some way toward explaining such mixed thinking about free will, but this is only a start. ___ Note 1: For those interested, this topic connects up with many previously discussed on the blog. In particular, it engages with: the affective error theory proposed by Nichols and Knobe, which Florian Cova discussed last year; Murray and Nahmiass fascinating bypassing account, which Knobe nicely summarizes here and Rose and Nichols have recently challenged in a clever way. Note 2: My cluster theory was inspired to a large extent by the interesting non-experimental work of John Maier as well as my previous work with Richard Holton on weakness of will, which Knobe summarized at Flickers of Freedom several years ago.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 02:11:00 +0000
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