Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?

In a recent paper entitled "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" (Under review at Analysis), Eddy Nahmias, Thomas Nadelhoffer (me), Jason Turner, and Stephen Morris present empirical data from their attempts to determine whether incompatibilism is intuitive to laypersons. The following is an excerpt:

"Incompatibilist claims about ordinary intuitions may be read as predictions about how pre-philosophical folk will respond to relevant thought experiments. Consider Kane’s claim that ‘ordinary persons … believe there is some kind of conflict between freedom and determinism’ (Kane 1999: 217). This suggests the following prediction:

(P) When presented with a deterministic scenario, most ordinary people will judge that agents in such a scenario do not act of their own free will and are not morally responsible for their actions.

To see that (P) is a fair way of reading incompatibilist claims about people’s intuitions, consider J.A. Cover and John O’Leary-Hawthorne’s suggestion that any claim that ‘compatibilism does full justice to our ordinary conception of freedom ... is at best poor anthropology’ (1996: 50). Their supposed anthropological ‘evidence’ to the contrary consists of the assertion that:

When ordinary people come to consciously recognize and understand that some action is contingent upon circumstances in an agent’s past that are beyond that agent’s control, they quickly lose a propensity to impute moral responsibility to the agent for that action. We can readily explain this fact by supposing that ordinary people have a conception of freedom, agency, and moral responsibility according to which an action is free and accountable only if that action is not fully determined by circumstances, past or present, that are beyond the agent’s control. (50-51).

We suggest that incompatibilists making these sorts of claims about the intuitions and beliefs of ordinary people are tacitly committed to something along the lines of (P). And since (P) is an empirically testable prediction, we tested it."

Now, assume that the results of our experiments strongly suggest that (P) is false (which they do), what follows? Do incompatibilists need the support of folk intuitions? If so, why? If not, why not?

Comments

[Jeremy Pierce]

In one sense folk intuitions don't do anything except tell us what metaphysical views people have. The dominant view might be wrong. Yet in this case it might make a lot of difference. A huge portion of the debate is over whether the word 'freedom' (and its equivalents in other natural languages) will refer to the concept of freedom libertarians have in mind or something closer to what compatibilists have in mind. It seems that empirical study does have a bearing on this, since use determines meaning.

On another level, there's still work for the compatibilist to do in figuring out which premises or steps to deny in the arguments for incompatibilism. This kind of empirical study doesn't seem to me to help at all with that.

[seth edenbaum]

Frankly I'd be more interested in knowing the basis for such a response. Are people thinking abstractly when they claim no contradiction, or are they simply refusing to deny morality?
Are they thinking abstractly or refusing to?

[Brian Leiter]

I'd like to hear more details about the experiments used to test the folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.

Whatever the state of folk intuitions, I take it that incompatibilists can fall back on central Western traditions of moral and religious thought in which incompatibilist themes are important, and which find expression in, e.g., the David Brooks column I recently remarked on (http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001307.html#001307), in which moral responsibility is tied to being a "self-initiating agent," or, as Nietzsche would put it, causa sui. That the incompatibilist elements in our major religious traditions have become attenuated in the folk intuitions in the popular culture--assuming that is true--may tell us very little about free will and moral responsibility and quite a lot about the contemporary economic and cultural forces operating on the "folk."