Doris on Nichols: The Return of the Unstoppable GFP Reading Group

Dear Gardeners:
It’s my honor to comment publicly on Shaun Nichols’ “How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate?”, since I’ve been consulting his work with great profit for years.  As is the philosophical convention, I offer repayment in the form of “higgling and haggling.”

Disclosures
My haggling commences early, with Nichols’ opening query.  Questions like  “Are people free and morally responsible?” (1),  invite the unwary to suppose that two questions “Are people free? And “Are people morally responsible?” require one answer; the implication is that the fate of freedom (in some to be specified metaphysical sense) and the fate of moral responsibility are intermingled.  But as Nichols is well aware, not everyone accepts this commingling of philosophical fates; like lots of folks, I’m inclined to answer “No and Yes”; people aren’t free, but they are (sometimes) morally responsible.  My reasons for thinking this are numbingly familiar:  I’m (something like) an incompatiblist about determinism and freedom and (something like) a compatiblist about determinism and responsibility (see Fischer 1999), and I share the suspicion, voiced by people like Pereboom (2001) and Sommers (2005), that it wouldn’t help much if determinism were false.  I’m moved by considerations in the neighborhood of what Nichols (9) calls “Hobbes’ libertarian dilemma,” and I join the chorus of cranky metaphysical philistines in claiming to find agent-causal libertarian accounts of freedom verging on unintelligible.   In short, I’ve P-Strawsonian sympathies of a decidedly unpanicky sort, and that makes me think that the tractable questions in the areas of action theory and moral psychology have to do with responsibility rather than freedom, and that these tractable questions are all the questions we need.

Enough about me.  What do I think about Nichols (1) Three (interrelated) Projects?  By way of kicking off our discussion, I’ll say something about the descriptive, prescriptive, and substantive projects, in that order.

The Descriptive Project
As Gardeners have already occasion to observe, I, together with my friends Joshua Knobe and Rob Woolfolk, think “the folk” are variantist about responsibility, meaning I endorse the view flagged by Nichols (3n4) in a footnote: it is unlikely that ordinary people’s responses to questions in this area are consistent by the light of systematic philosophical theories like libertarianism and compatiblism.  I’m pretty sure it goes this way for responsibility, because I think we’ve learned a good bit recently about responsibility attribution, but I’m quite unsure of how non-philosophers think about notions like “freedom” and “free will,” in part because I’m quite unsure of these notions when I see them deployed by philosophers.  In general, I think it’s not at all easy to glom how non-philosophers think about the slippery metaphysical notions that exercise philosophers. In doing empirical work, we need to take pains, as Nichols’ (6) notes, over what sort of freedom subjects have in mind; in particular, we need to take pains to see if they are operating with a “Kantian” notion of freewill (henceforth KFW), where “could have done otherwise” gets cashed in some suitably indeterminist way.  Hard work, that.  For now, I’m just not sure how important KFW is to the action theorist on the street, and I don’t think the current state of evidence justifies much confidence one way or another.  Of course, similar complaints might be (and have been) raised about the experimental scrutiny of most any philosophically interesting term.  But I’m inclined – perhaps because of my aforementioned metaphysical philistinism – to suspect that things are especially knotty in the area of KFW.  It’s also true that complicating associations are likely to run hot and thick here; when George Bush suggests that terrorists “hate freedom,” I doubt he means that terrorists have a strong antipathy to KFW.

The Prescriptive Project
Whatever one thinks about the outcome of the descriptive project, it’s likely to impact one’s thinking on the prescriptive project.  (Hark! Was that the sound of another plank being laid on The Bridge Over the Is/Ought Gap?)  For what one thinks folks ought be doing is going to be informed by what one thinks they are doing; strange for me to think you ought stop acting like a jerk, if I don’t think you’re acting like a jerk.

    In the present regard at least, I don’t think folks are acting like jerks; I’m (more or less) on record, again with Knobe and Woolfolk, as a conservative; in the area of responsibility, I think the presumption is against philosophically pressed revisions in ordinary thought and practice.   On the particular question of “what would happen if people stopped believing in libertarian free will [here, KFW],” I find myself a bit at sea.  As I’ve said, I don’t know that people much believe in KFW, but I do believe that people often enough, if not always, attribute responsibility like good compatiblists (see Woolfolk et al. 2006; Nahmias et al. 2006), and this makes me (for better or worse) inclined to doubt that KFW is deeply implicated in people’s thinking about their selves and social world.  Like Nichols (13-14), I’m therefore not much inclined to worry that “anarchy and despair would ensue if people knew” – assuming they don’t already – “there is no libertarian free will.”  As Nichols (14) notes, this is an empirical question -- an empirical question, it seems to me, that it would be rather difficult to sort out.

    We might try cross-cultural studies, and attempt to see if cultures manifesting pervasive belief in KFW are detectably better off than cultures not manifesting such belief.  We might look for results, say, indicating that the high murder rate or the racist death penalty in the US is associated with weaker belief in KFW than in countries less afflicted with such pathologies.  Now we might find that belief in KFW is pancultural, in which case we couldn’t do such studies.  But that would be a result worth having: it would certainly get my attention to be shown that belief in a Western philosophical theory  -- a theory I think is deeply problematic – is pancultural. 

I expect you can guess where I’m heading:  the work in cultural psychology done by people like Dick Nisbett and his outfit makes me doubt that belief in KFW is pancultural.  Now the needed empirical work on culture and KFW has not, so far as I know, been done.  But suppose we found, as I’m guessing we might, that belief in KFW is weaker in some East Asian cultures, and further suppose we find that these cultures exhibit higher rates of certain pathologies than do cultures where belief in KFW is stronger.  We might then, with some theoretical work, tell a story linking the belief states and the pathological states.  I doubt it would come out that way, but it’s not completely fantastical to think it’s empirical work we might make a start on. 

Alternatively, we might proceed on the intracultural level.  We might try to identify the believers and non-believers about LFW, and see how their lives go.  Is there reason to suspect that the non-believers would exhibit more in the way of pathologies like suicide and child abuse?  I’ve no evidence on this score, but I’m strongly inclined to doubt we’d find differences.  My skepticism is initially sourced in reflecting on the general form:  “If people became convinced of the falsity of [fill in the philosophical position of your choice], social and psychological catastrophe would ensue.”   Uh . . . ok.  Perhaps free will is different, say, than statue counting, and this is one philosophical debate with sharp practical teeth, but I find myself doubtful.

    Of course, if the folks who think – unlike me – that the folk are pretty uniformly believers in LFW are right, we couldn’t do the sort of field study I propose, as the subject pool would be too homogeneous for comparative work.  But maybe we could do a sort of controlled experiment, and induce skepticism about LFW in a group of subjects, and compare their ensuing mental hygiene to non-skeptical controls.  But wait!  If there’s any credence to be given the conjectures of people like Smilansky (2002: 500, 505n7), we should hesitate to perform such a study, and we should expect (or hope!) that human subjects boards would withhold approval.  For by inducing skepticism about LFW, we’d also be inducing psychopathology, and that wouldn’t be right. 

    Hold on.  Don’t some of us – myself included – try to induce skepticism about LFW in the classroom?  Sounds like we need to do some follow-up studies, and see how our students – victims? -- are faring.  Of course, I may be flattering myself; probably I’ve never convinced my students of anything.  But some students are convinced by skepticism about LFW; I was one of them myself.  And while I’d be the first to admit that my life is something of a mess, I’m rather inclined to doubt that this sorry spectacle is due my adherence to a philosophical position.  I’d also be the first to admit that I can’t be sure about this, at least barring a few more years of therapy.  But given the stakes, it seems to me caution is in order: no more teaching skepticism about LFW.  No there’s a prescription for you!

The Substantive Project
On the substantive question, I seem to be what Nichols calls an eliminativist about free will: I contend, “[Kantian] free will doesn’t exist” (1).  But I’m not – aforementioned   concerns about my mental health notwithstanding -- much inclined to worry about this, because, as I’ve said, I think questions of free will and responsibility are detachable, and we needn’t throw out the ethical baby with the metaphysical bathwater.   

But it has long been my vague impression that many psychologists are guilty of such infanticide.  One unfortunate result of this is that some pretty fabulous psychology can get transmogrified into some pretty unpersuasive philosophy.  As a devotee of the human sciences, particularly experimental social psychology, I think this is unfortunate, so I’d like to linger a bit over Nichols’ (9-11) discussion of Bargh and colleagues, and the very interesting – and philosophically significant – work on automaticity and dual process theory.   It’s a big topic, and I can at present only sound a few notes of caution -- amplifications, really, of some things Nichols says.

Although I won’t argue it here, I’m convinced that the automaticity literature makes for heavy philosophical weather, but the storm is not brewing in the vicinity of causal determinism.  As Nichols notes, psychologists sometimes leave us with the contrary impression. For example, Bargh and Ferguson claim that “behaviorists and cognitive (and social-cognitive) scientists have accumulated evidence of determinism by their many demonstrations of mental and behavioral processes that can proceed without the intervention of conscious deliberation and choice” (2000: 925), and conclude that automaticity experiments  “provide… rather obvious evidence that even controlled mental processes are themselves controlled and determined” (2000: 939).  There are numerous problems with this line of thought.

The argument looks like an inductive one: psychologists can tell deterministic stories of the sort that are threatening to notions of freedom and agency for a wide variety of systematically observed behaviors.  Furthermore, they can tell such stories even in cases where the actors themselves would reject the deterministic explanation and explain their behavior by reference to their own agency.  (This is the problem of confabulation; see Hirstein 2005.)  Therefore, we are supposed to conclude that a deterministic causal story may be told for all unobserved behavior, even when the actors insist on their agency.

Mercifully, the overwhelming majority of human behavior is not subject to observation and analysis by psychologists.  Thus, the induction base for the inductive argument is miniscule; the percentage of all behaviors that are observed in the relevant sense is vanishingly small.  Talk about meager input and torrential output!  This might be put off to the magic of induction, but there’s further reason for hesitation. 

In relatively few psychological experiments are the manipulations “100 percent effective”: not all experimental behavior, even in cases of smashingly successful manipulations, is determined in the way the investigators are trying to determine it.   Grabbing at the first examples that pop to mind, Milgram’s (1974) classic obedience paradigm was “65% effective” while Darley and Batson’s (1973) high-hurry manipulation in their Good Samaritan study was “90% effective.”  What are we to say of the participants who don’t – dammit – do what   they’re supposed to? 

KFWers will be quick to see the hope of free action here.  After all, KFWers don’t need to deny that many, or even most, actions are determined in the problematic sense; they just need to deny that they all are.  I don’t see how the psychological experiments, with their mixed effects, can rule this possibility out.  It’s tempting to suppose – as many investigators likely do – that there must be a deterministic causal story for the awkward percentage of recalcitrant participants, even if we can’t yet sort out the details.  But this is another instance of leaping inductive faith, and it is not obvious we are compelled to convert.  Indeed, the determination (forgive me!) to do so is likely a function of a prior theoretical commitment to determinism, and that’s precisely what’s at issue.

These cautions, although worth noting, are not the main reason for my caution.  Instead, it’s that I cling to a theoretical commitment of my own: as I’ve been saying, I’m (something of) a compatiblist about responsibility, meaning  (near enough) that I think that the truth of determinism is compatible with the existence of the sort of human agency presupposed by ethical practices such as punishment and responsibility attribution (Doris 2002: Ch. 7; Doris and Stich 2005; Woolfolk et al. 2006). And if you’re my kind of (near enough) compatiblist, you think that the philosophically fertile trouble lies not in the fact that actions and decisions are caused (even deterministically caused), but in the facts of how they are caused.   In short, some causal stories make trouble for responsibility, and some don’t. 

Interestingly, while compatiblism is a conventional, if controversial, option in philosophy, it does not generally seem to be a theoretical option that much exercises psychologists, even the psychologists doing experimental work that is profoundly relevant to the philosophy of human action.  This seems to me a pity, not only because of my theoretical predilections, but also because the compatiblist perspective can help us to focus on the psychologically important question of “How caused?” – a question that is important whatever one thinks of determinism. 

That’s what I think the issues aren’t, on the empirical side of the substantive project; my view here is a particular instance of my conviction, stated at the outset, that the problems we moral psychologists and action theorists should take ourselves to have are not the problems of freewill and determinism.  But that’s more than enough Doris for today; concerning what I think the issues are, I encourage you to eagerly await the completion of my “How to Build a Person.”

Thanks!
Yours faithfully,
Doris

Comments

[Mike Tintner]

I find both Nichols' article and the whole philosophical free will debate amazing in the following respect:

the first thing that science has to contribute to discussions here is surely that there is NO EVIDENCE for determinism whatsoever. And this surely should be the starting-point of all philosophical or scientific discussions of the subject. (There are plenty of LOGICAL arguments of the cause-effect variety for determinism but no evidence as such. There are powerful logical arguments for all kinds of things - like hares being unable to overtake tortoises, pace Zeno - but they are all worthless without evidence). But neither philosophers nor scientists seem interested at all in the evidence.

For there to be evidence, you would have to show that human beings or any other animals take decisions and act consistently over time - lawfully, according to formulae (which may vary, of course, according to the type of decision). This isn't hard to test. Human beings take a great number of decisions repeatedly in all their activities - about whether, for example, to have a pudding or 2nd helping today, another cigarette, drink, whether to work or watch TV, do all their set exercises in the gym, get up or lie in another 5 mins etc. etc. If human beings are determined, they must take such decisions consistently over time - according to some unconscious formulae, and following identifiable patterns. Science can fairly easily conduct any number of experiments and investigations here. In fact, it's the FIRST thing any scientist - and indeed, I suggest, any philosopher should investigate. If you're positing that lawful, deterministic behaviour occurs, you investigate whether it actually does. It's elementary.

But, amazingly, to my knowledge, neither scientists nor philosophers have done this.

Nichols & others seem concerned to test how people's beliefs may affect their decisionmaking, but not to test their actual decisions and their consistency.

There's fairly strong indirect evidence here,by the way, which is that after hundreds of years now and hundreds of thousands of scientists extensively investigating human and animal behaviour, they have produced NO LAWS OF VOLUNTARY BEHAVIOUR - and failed to provide any serious evidence that humans do decide or conduct any of their activities consistently/ deterministically. There seems to be a consistent inductive pattern there. (Again, the total lack of laws/ evidence here doesn't seem to bother determinist philosophers or scientists at all).

In fact, I would gladly bet hard money that any scientific investigation of how human beings decide to work, play, watch tv, eat, drink or conduct any of their activities, will show that when faced with the same basic decisions repeatedly, we act FREELY - we actually do decide either way, i.e. first one way, then the other, oscillating. Show me, for example, someone who isn't struggling to work, exercise, and be active, on the one hand, and, on the other, to control their appetites - and, as a result, making a lot of contradictory (free) decisions - now working, now idling, now indulging, now abstaining etc - and you won't be pointing to a human being.

IS anyone interested in the evidence about human decisionmaking?

[Neil]

Doris and Nichols, for all their disagreements, agree on one thing: that it is important *philosophically* to study folk intuitions about free will. I am an exponent of experimental philosophy, because I am interested in how the mind works, and this is something that has to be investigated empirically. But I doubt that uncovering folk intuitions about free will contributes to the central problems at issue in the free will debate. We are interested in the best systematization of our intuitions in wide reflective equilibrium, and the folk are not in reflective equilibrium. That's why conservatism is an unstable position. I've pointed out before that getting conservative results from the folk depends on taking steps to *avoid* nudging them toward reflective equilibrium: using between subjects designs, for instance, to avoid bringing inconsistencies in judgment to their attention. The studies themselves show that when within subject designs are used, people are motivated to reduce inconsistencies in their judgments. That is not a performance error, but part of moral competence. We ought to build on that competence, not reject it (anymore than we should conclude from the fact that subjects are bad at Wason selection tasks that there is something wrong with modus ponens).

According to Nichols, the central descriptive question is: “Is the folk concept of free will compatible with determinism?” If the answer is yes, he says, then compatibilism is the right view, and determinism does not pose a threat to our current views and practices. I think this is multiply mistaken. First, it is mistaken philosophically. Suppose that (a) the folk are incompatibilists but that (b) compatibilism is the right view. In that case, it seems, determinism does not represent a threat to our current practices (cf. folk intuitions about statistics: they may clash with the right view about statistics, but that doesn’t show that we ought to change our sampling practices).

Second, it might even be mistaken as a way of investigating the relationship between the folk and our practices. Nichols understand the ‘folk concept of free will’ to be (something like) the view that best accords with their intuitions about moral responsibility. But this is not the only way to investigate the folk view. We might instead ask which view of free will best accords with the practices they accept. Suppose that some modular view of mind is correct. The output of modules is shallow: it is a seeming, not a judgment. Whether the seeming is endorsed in a judgment depends upon other facts about the agent, including what her other views are.

Nichols’ genetic argument: like (say) Joyce, Nichols argues that the belief in indeterminism is unjustified, and therefore we ought to abandon it. Our everyday observations are, he says, entirely consistent with the truth of determinism. But they are equally consistent with the truth of indeterminism. So if this argument succeeds, it is surely an argument for agnosticism.

Finally, a comment on an issue that Doris takes up: what would the practical implications of moral responsibility scepticism be? It might be that our moral judgment module is congitively impenetrable, or (to use Stich's language) that the view that agents are morally responsible is a sub-doxastic state that is "sticky". In which case we would expect the impact *on individual's judgments* to be zero. But it does not follow from this fact that it would not, or should not, alter social practices. Our best epistemic practices are not subservient to the views of the folk, or even to the views of experts when they are relaxing. Physics is not answerable to folk physics (else rockets wouldn't fly). So there is more than one empirical question here. By all means, investigate folk judgments in various paradigms. I think this is interesting work. But the relationship between it and both philosophy and social policy is very distant.I can't resist one more analogy: Hauser, with Cushman and Young, has shown that proximity makes a difference to subjects moral judgments. But it does not follow that our law should be sensitive to this parameter, or that philosophers should conclude that harms caused up close and personal are really more morally significant.

[Jonathan]

I find Nichols' use of the "genetic argument" interesting, and yet, a little unsettling. His analogy is that of Freud's (and Feuerbach, and Marx): We believe in God because X (e.g., God fulfills our hidden desires, God is an opiate against economic injustice), and therefore belief in God is unwarranted. So, Nichols proposes, "Similarly we might find that the source of our belief in libertarian free will reveals that the belief is unwarranted." Now, the efficacy of this analogy makes two somewhat dubious assumptions. Firstly, there's the assumption that Freud (and Feuerbach and Marx) are right. Many philosophers of religion would beg to differ (although they mostly happen to be libertarians). Secondly, Nichols puts the burden of proof squarely upon the shoulders of the libertarians. While I'm sure Flew is right in presuming atheism, I'm less sure that the "presumption of psychologial determinism" is on such firm footing. That having been said, Nichol pulls his punches in the last papragraph of that section, listing some important qualifications (e.g., his philosophical assumptions concerning warrant, the speculative nature of the story).

Perhaps someone could comment more adequately about this.

[john m. doris]

"For there to be evidence [of determinism], you would have to show that human beings or any other animals take decisions and act consistently over time."

Which consistency? Consistency relative to cultural categories such as "to have a pudding or 2nd helping today, another cigarette, drink, whether to work or watch TV, do all their set exercises in the gym, get up or lie in another 5 mins etc. etc." Why is it these consistencies against which the order of the universe is judged?

This is all much above me, I fear. But then, I did say that the determinism/freedom issue is not where I think the action for action theory lies.

Doris

[Mike Tintner]

I am surprised that consistency is above you (john D).

The only way we know that inanimate matter is determined is because it acts consistently, lawfully. Stones, when dropped, repeatedly and consistently fall to earth. Apply a given force to any kind of matter - push a chair say - and it will always react in the same, consistent way, in the same conditions. Science has conducted innumerable experiments that prove this. Newton's Laws of Motion are based on this. And we can more or less see it with our own eyes.

If you want to show that living organisms, including animals and humans, are determined, you must show that they too behave - and, more particularly, take decisions - consistently, lawfully, repeatedly. That humans, say, decide how to bet, invest, which TV programs to watch, when to work, (or any of the other normal decisions of everyday life) etc. consistently, lawfully on repeated occasions. Science has totally failed to do this. It hasn't managed to establish any laws of voluntary behaviour for living organisms - basically because living organisms and especially human beings are NOT rational, consistent decisionmakers as the behavioral sciences like to make out.

(The reason I carefully use the word "consistent" is that determined behaviour need not be precisely repetitive. Inanimate matter and most machines do repeat themselves exactly. A person, however, could be determined and keep changing their decisions - if, for example, they always learn from their mistakes. But then that changing behaviour would have, if determined, to follow an identifiable, deterministic pattern and principle(s) ).

That it should be "above you" to understand that the only way to prove that humans or any other class of creature are determined, is to produce evidence that they do decide and act consistently and lawfully, is in a sense astonishing. There is no principle more basic to science or indeed to the philosophy of determinism

And yet it is also not astonishing. You are in good company. My point, to elaborate it a little, is that the entire free will debate has been so preoccupied with the MECHANICS of decisionmaking - and trying to understand how a decision might or might not be determined or indeterminate - that no one has bothered to investigate people's actual decisionmaking BEHAVIOUR and see whether they really do decide in consistent, lawful ways. As it happens, they don't.

But then philosophers are largely divorced from reality here. A classic example - which essentially repeats the point I am making above - is the Buridan's ass argument. Philosophers are quite happy to consider and discuss this and similar arguments, without anyone ever stopping to consider the EVIDENCE and ask: "wait a minute, have any asses actually ever been found dead at a point equidistant between two bundles of hay?"

Of course, the free will debate will never get anywhere if it does not consider the evidence as a matter of course.

[Tamler Sommers]

Mike,

You seem to be confusing the free will debate with the debate over whether determinism is true. You wouldn't be the first to do this (although you might be the first to do it so stridently). John's point at the end of his reply, I think, was that the 'action'--the crux of the matter when it comes to free will and moral responsibility--has little to do with whether the type of determinism you're talking about is true.

Neil beat me to a lot of the points I wanted to make about Shaun's article and John's comments. And I have more to say about it than I have time to write. But I'd like to hear Shaun (and John's) reply to what I think is Neil's first question. Why is compatibilism automatically the right view if the folk conception of free will is compatible with determinism? I know some compatibilists (Fritz maybe?) who would reply: 'if the folk think free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism (or naturalism or mechanism), then the folk are wrong. And it's our job as philosophers to show them why they're wrong.

[Mike Tintner]

Tamler,

You're saying that the reason people generally and philosophers particularly have been arguing for thousands of years about whether we are free or determined is NOT because they're interested in the truth of the matter? But rather because they're interested in definitions of terms - what constitutes an "action", and whether definitions of "free will" and "determinism" are compatible with definitions of "compatibilism" etc? That's what you reckon it's all about?

[Kip Werking]

Thanks Doris, for your thoughtful and humorous comments.

I always want thank Neil for his excellent comment, which raises points that I would have made---if only I had thought of them.

Here are my scattered remarks on Nichols’ paper, as I scan through it again:

1. I think the child studies are very weak evidence. I’m not sure why asking what children think about free will is any more relevant or helpful, in this debate, than asking what lobotomized people think about free will.
2. When philosophers have discussed the conditional analysis of “can”, they often use the phrase “if… then would” as opposed to the phrase “had to happen”. The latter phrase implies something like compulsion or coercion, and so the folk might think something like “had to happen, well there wasn’t a gun to the person’s head, so it didn’t have to happen.” But this is not the intuition we are trying to test. Similarly, if we imagine a piano-player on a train with no piano, we can imagine how the piano-player has the capacity to play but presently cannot. So the folk might think “it did not have to happen that way because the agent had the capacity to do something else.” Again, I’m not sure this is the sort of intuition we want to test. Instead, we want to test what the folk think *will* actually happen. So, to nitpick (one can always nitpick these studies to death): it might be better to use the phrase “if… then would” instead.
3. I can sympathize with the phrase “libertarian free will” but, at least for anti-libertarians, the phrase makes no sense. Even Smilansky, who agrees that indeterminism cannot help and studied under Galen Strawson, refers to “libertarian free will” as if indeterminism might have helped but just happens not to. But this doesn’t make sense. It might be better to refer to “magic free will” or being causa sui. But referring to “libertarian free will” just helps promote the illusion that indeterminism can somehow help.
4. I agree that the Spinoza/introspection argument doesn’t work or is incomplete, as I’ve mentioned here. So I agree that Greene and Cohen’s view is “attractive, but mistaken.” Certainly we don’t think other minds work in indeterministic ways *just* because they are minds. But I also think they are onto *something*. One possibility to consider is the phenomenon of demonization processes: the turning of a blind eye to the causes and motivations of transgressors. Nichols and Knobe’s famous study supports this. Another possibility is that, in accordance with the fundamental attribution error, it is just more efficient to assume that behavior follows character and not that character, in turn, is somehow influenced by environment. Nichols’ counterexample of the twitching eye does not demolish the possibility of such mental phenomenon, but just shows that it is not the *only* response to seemingly spontaneous movement.
5. I like Nichols’ example of belief in free will evolving because of the utility of conveying “strong” possibility (I’m also found of his earlier explanation involving Kantian duties). I remember him describing this explanation to me over drinks at the Garden during Inland 2006. I still think, as I did then, that it is far too narrow. Perhaps it is part of the story, but only a small part at that. But the more important point I want to make about this new explanation is that it is an example of Error Management Theory, but involving parenting and not evolution. In my own last article I describe several example of how biases might evolve because certain mistakes were more costly than other mistakes (e.g. is that a snake in the grass?). But in all of those examples, I suggest that selection pressures weeded out those without the bias and preserved those who had it. What is fascinating to me is that Nichols describes the exact same Error Management logic, but on the exponentially faster time-scale of parenting a child. Instead of selective pressures weeding out those without the biases over millions of years, Nichols suggests (as I understand him) that children learn from their parents to use “can” in the sense of strong possibility, because that helps parents avoid certain dangers.
6. How is this difference between Nichols’ view and my own relevant? There are two important consequences. One is that my evolutionary explanations are more vulnerable to cross-cultural variation. If Nichols’ view depends upon how parents raise their children in a given culture then any free will illusion might be sensitive to cultural variation, as Doris suggests (although one would expect parents to have their children avoid harm in *all* or most cultures). But if the bias has been programmed into our species’ brains (admitting, perhaps, of smaller variation along racial lines), we should expect less variation. The other important consequence is that Nichols’ view seems limited to the narrow context of parents using “strong possibility” language with their children. Even if this is part of the story, I doubt it is all of it, and I suggest that a multitude of cognitive biases help explain why belief in free will is so popular.
7. Of course determinism can never be shown to be true. The comments by Mike Tintner seem, to me, to be confused. Because even if there are no regularities in macro-scopic behavior (waking up from bed every day at the same time), regularities in micro-scopic behavior might still allow determinism to be true. To see a good example of this, consider Wolfram’s cellular automata according to rule 30: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 This is a deterministic system that doesn’t have any macro-level regularities and appears to be purely random.
8. For reasons I have largely stated already, I disagree with Nichols when he says “But I suspect that if we want to know in our lifetimes whether we should believe in libertarian free will, our best hope is a psychologically-informed genetic argument.” Indeed, I wonder whether Nichols really means this or is being overly generous to libertarians. Libertarianism is a non-starter for the sort of a priori reasons Nichols mentions earlier in his article. There is no way indeterminism could secure more control for agents; you don’t need to perform an experiment to realize this.
9. Nichols cites evidence suggesting that, if people started to doubt the existence of free will, bad things wouldn’t happen. But I remember Josh Knobe citing some tentative research, at Inland, showing that those people presented reasons for doubting the existence of free will were more likely to cheat in a later game (if I remember this correctly). Nichols also cites research from 1982 showing that determinists were not less punitive than indeterminists. But I’ve cited research on this blog before showing that determinists are less punitive than indeterminists (PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORTS 93 (3): 1013-1021 Part 2, DEC 2003). I don’t know if either researcher has commented on the other’s work, but I find this later research to be more telling considering Nichols’ remark that “the measure used for identifying determinists is flawed, and so here is another obvious place for further psychological research.”
10. The most important point comes last: what surprised me most about Nichols’ article is his sympathy for retributivism. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m more committed against retributivism than against free will. I think there is tension between Nichols’ seeming complacency with the prospect of people stopping to believe in free will and his seeming alarm at the prospect of people abandoning retributivism. He suggests that abandoning free will would cause no problems but hints that, if we abandon retributivism, this might be a mistake on the scale of Soviet communism. What is even more fascinating, to me, is that the reasons Nichols’ cites against retributivism are decidedly consequentialist (and not consequentialist about rights or duties, but consequentialist about utility or something like it). He suggests that we should not be quick to abandon retributivism because it works so well, and helps society function, and results in happy outcomes. But this is not retributivism at all. Retributivism, in the philosophical sense, is punishment where the punishee’s wrongdoing is a sufficient justification for the punishment. Rather, Nichols uses “retributivism” to describe consequentialism in a behavior-technology Dark Ages, where we have yet to invent the moral pills that we would prefer to use. By analogy, saying that punishing defectors in those social science experiments is a good idea is like Churchill saying that capitalism is “the worst economic system, except all the others.” So I think Nichols agrees with me that retributivism is mistaken, but I wish he would voice that agreement more explicitly.

[Tamler Sommers]

Mike,

No, I'm saying that we can evaluate the truth of the claims 'we have free will' or 'we can be morally responsible' without having any idea whether or not determinism is true. Many philosophers working on free will are frankly and explicitly agnostic about that question. In fact, no contemporary theory of freedom or responsibility that I'm aware of depends on the TRUTH of determinism (as you describe it)--so lacking evidence for determinism is simply not a problem. That's why I think your criticism of philosophers as being detached from evidence that is crucial for theories is misguided--at least in this particular case...

[Mike Tintner]

Tamler,

I find your answer v. confusing - and it's ok to leave it there. But let me explain briefly : "we have free will (or not)" and "determinism is not true (or is true)" are corollaries. You can't separate them as you seem to be trying to do when it comes to establishing their truth.

Secondly, you can't "evaluate" the truth of these claims - you can only PROVE or disprove them to a greater or lesser degree by producing EVIDENCE about people's actual decisionmaking (which has been my main point all along).

Thirdly, there are no modern theories of freedom worth a damn - the problem of free will remains unsolved as Searle, for one, acknowledges. And one big reason for this is that no one has produced, or is even concerned to produce, any serious EVIDENCE. (Kane and Frankfurt and perhaps one or two others may have added the odd minor dimension to our awareness of the problem, but they haven't solved it).

Best

P.S. Producing evidence is a helluva lot harder than producing logical arguments - that's the real reason most philosophers avoid it.

[Clark Goble]

Just to add I also don't think the issue of determinism is particularly relevant beyond perhaps to some religious people. But even there the issue of foreknowledge is often more significant than determinism, even though sometimes the two have the same effect.

As to whether determinism is or isn't true, I'm not sure what would count as evidence. Was Newtonianism evidence for determinism and quantum theory evidence against? Perhaps, although I think that overly simple. I think determinism is ultimately a metaphysical issue and not really open to that strong of evidence from the sciences.

As to the issue of language, I confess that the linguistic nature of these things does get a bit annoying at times. I understand why, especially after Austin and company, the focus on the common linguistic meaning of the terms so as to frame the question of free will is used. I think it unfortunate in some ways, although I'll not belabor the point. One can't help but raise the incommensurity issue that pops up in the sciences though. Is the question of freedom today the same as was held by the Greeks and by the medievals? Or even the early moderns?

I'll not go down that tangent. But I think that in a way that question is relevant to those looking at revisionist accounts of free will or responsibility.

[Clark Goble]

Mike, to add in response to your last comment, the truth of determinism need not be relevant if both indeterminism and determinism end up being incompatible with out linguistic notions of free will. Thus arguments regarding luck and free will which seem to me to be quite important. It seems to me that the metaphysical debates about say libertarian free will do discuss determinism and often reject it. But one need not discuss the ontology of libertarianism in order to discuss free will. Perhaps that's the problem you are having? There are other ways to approach the question although clearly libertarians have often argued against determinism (or foreknowledge).

In passing it seems this is one reason why the metaphysics of libertarianism often offer a third way. Either ontological emergence where there are real choices emerging out of indeterminism which are causally effecious or choice as a ontological fact of certain substances, thus being neither determined nor indeterminate in the sense of random.

I'd add that evidence never ends up being proof for something as such. At least in any scientific sense. Let's keep proofs for logic and mathematics. What I think the philosophical issues do is look for logical inconsistencies, such as between say determinism and certain definitions of free will. The debate then becomes what definitions of free will ought count. What counts as evidence there is a tad more complex in my eyes.

I'm not sure Searle is necessarily relevant here. (What do you mean by "even Searle?)

Personally I think psychology and neurology will show that we are much less free than we wish to believe in the sense of the practical implications of our cultural uses of free. So maybe that's what you mean by evidence?

[Manuel]

Lots of interesting stuff in both the paper and Doris' response. I suspect that the gap between Doris and Nichols is not so big as it seems: both can agree that the folk have both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions, and that the bulk of our ordinary responsibility practices are in comparatively good normative standing (this latter consideration is part of what I take it funds the revisionist (compatibilist) thread in Nichols' work). So, while there is a disagreement about "depth" of incompatibilist intuitions, maybe this disagreement doesn't come to much. At any rate, the relative security of the responsibility practices on grounds independent of libertarianism seems to be part of an answer to Tamler's question about why compatibilist revisionism, as opposed to eliminativism about responsibility.

A few scattered thoughts on other things in the paper:

I do find one feature about diagram 1 misleading: In response to the substantive question, the ‘no’ question does not necessarily entail free will eliminativism, as Nichols himself notes in footnote 3. What is needed is a further branch point, between eliminativism and revisionism on that point, with the prescriptive question open on both eliminativist and revisionist replies.

I’m also inclined to think there is more space to resist Nichols dismissal of epistemic interpretations of ‘can’. It isn’t without its problems, but perhaps the children are committed to (without necessarily understanding that they are so committed) to something like the old Smart-style analysis of CDO: given what I did know about the kind of thing involved and the kinds of conditions I’m aware of, another result is possible. This gives fuel to more traditional compatibilists than I tend to like, though, so hopefully I'm wrong.

On the warrant for belief in libertarianism in the face of a genetic (or alternative explanations) for such a belief, I think Dan Speak’s recent work on this stuff (an essay in the recent Phil Topics volume, and a conference paper he gave at USF recently) is relevant. If Dan is right, it is much harder to read off warrants for philosophical beliefs for and against libertarianism in the face of empirical data than we might suspect. If this issue is of interest, I highly recommend looking at Dan's stuff.

[shaunnichols]

Many thanks to the indefatigable Manuel Vargas for inviting me to provide a paper and for setting everything up. And thanks to John Doris for providing such an interesting set of comments. As always, it’s rewarding to reflect on Doris’ ideas and a great pleasure to read his prose. If more philosophers wrote like Doris, I’d read a lot more philosophy. Here are a few thoughts on John's comments.

Descriptive project
Doris writes “For now, I’m just not sure how important KFW [Kantian Free Will] is to the action theorist on the street, and I don’t think the current state of evidence justifies much confidence one way or another.”

I think there is a bit of evidence that something like KFW plays a role in the judgments of people on the street. In several studies with Joshua Knobe (http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/moralresponsibilityFinal.pdf) and with Adina Roskies (presented in the “How Can Psychology…”), we found an apparently strong strand of incompatibilism under certain conditions. At least when the cases do not rile one’s strong emotions or threaten too close to home, people in our culture seem to think that causal determinism precludes robust moral responsibility. Even if that’s right, Doris’ question remains – does the incompatibilism uncovered here play an important role in everyday judgments about moral responsibility?

It is a commonplace that we do engage in practices of excusing and exempting people from charges of moral responsibility. For instance, we excuse Joe because it’s obvious that he could not have done otherwise – after all, he was brainwashed, or compelled by kleptomania, or manipulated. Incompatibilists have long maintained that many of these exculpatory practices and intuitions are just special cases that flow from a more general incompatibilist source. However, even if it’s true that people have incompatibilist intuitions, it doesn’t follow that typical exculpatory intuitions flow from this general incompatibilism. So, we can see Doris as asking (in part) whether these judgments of exculpation reveal a deeper underlying commitment to incompatibilism, or whether they float free of the incompatibilist commitment. Let’s distinguish two descriptive questions here:

i. How much of our everyday exculpatory judgments depend on an incompatibilist source?
ii. How much of our everyday responsibility judgments would be relinquished if we gave up on the incompatibilist intuitions?

My impression is that many incompatibilists think that the answer to (i) is a lot. In his comments Doris stresses agnosticism. I definitely agree with the agnostic line on this. As far as I know there is no empirical evidence that attempts to explore the links between everyday judgments of exculpation and everyday commitments to incompatibilism.
In any case, even if the answer to (i) is "a lot", it might also be true that the answer to (ii) is "not much". That is, even if our judgments about responsibility and excuses flow from incompatibilist principles, it doesn’t follow that those everyday judgments would evaporate if we came to reject incompatibilism. Indeed, it strikes me as psychologically plausible that regardless of whether they have an incompatibilist source, our norms of excuses are well equipped to float freely. Maybe this even gets a bit of indirect empirical reinforcement from the phenomenon of belief perseverance. In the classic experiment, subjects who were led to believe that they did well at detecting real vs. fake suicide notes tended to continue thinking that they were good detectors of real suicide notes even after they had been told that the test results were complete fabrications. The general lesson taken from this (e.g. by Nisbett & Ross 1980) is that we do not retain the links between a belief and its source. In the present case then, the norms of excuses are fully established in our culture, and even if they have their ultimate intuitive source in an incompatibilist principle, it’s plausible that the norms can perfectly well manage a life on their own.

One final quick reflection on the descriptive project. While I have been happy to run lots of experiments on folk intuitions, I have generally avoided running experiments on the folk notion of “free will”, precisely because it’s a term of philosophical art. While the language of “could have done otherwise” is pervasive in our culture, the language of “free will” more typically emerges from the pulpit than the family room. But I think we can get some distance toward the true object of interest here by focusing on how people think about decisions. It is there that I think we seem to find a fairly strong folk rejection of determinism. My guess is that this indeterminism about decisions is pancultural, but I am unwilling even to guess about whether it’s a pancultural belief that determinism would preclude moral responsibility. One possibility that I (as a longtime incompatibilist) find troublingly plausible is that my own incompatibilist intuitions (about responsibility) reflect something culturally local and perhaps historically rather recent. Thus, in concert with ideas expressed by Doris and by John Fischer, it might turn out that while determinism would undermine a certain view about decisions, determinism does not pose a broad threat to lay notions of responsibility. Joshua Knobe, Hagop Sarkissian, and I are currently investigating cultural differences on these matters.

Catastrophe
Doris says that he’s not inclined to worry that anarchy & despair would result if people realized that there is no KFW. Of course, I agree. Anecdotally, it’s hard to resist (and I won’t even try) noting that the free-will eliminativist who most frequents the Garden, Tamler Sommers, is a positively irrepressible guy.
Doris is skeptical that the folk actually believe in KFW, and I’m happy to acknowledge that we need more data, from more parts of the world. But at the moment, I’d like to observe simply that even if the folk do believe in KFW, it should not be surprising if our psychological systems can accommodate free will eliminativism with no psychic meltdown. After all, most people’s psychological systems are robust enough to deal with all sorts of terrible realities. Also, as discussed in “How Can Psychology…”, Adina Roskies and I got results that suggest that people adjust very quickly to a compatibilist view of things. When given an alternate world scenario, our subjects gave incompatibilist responses; but when given the same story, but applied to our world, subjects gave compatibilist responses. Catastrophe averted.

Automaticity and catastrophe
A more viable threat of catastrophe emerges from the work on social psychology to which Doris adverts. A growing body of evidence indicates that nonconscious automatic processes have a surprising and pervasive influence on our decisions. In my paper, I argued that it’s a mistake for psychologists to take the data as evidence for determinism, and Doris agrees with this. But for several years Doris (2002, lots of recent talks, and the present comments) has suggested that the data might pose a much more real problem for moral responsibility than determinism ever could. Eddy Nahmias has expressed similar concerns in his recent work, and Manuel Vargas has supplied a delightful label for the view – neurotic compatibilism.

Let’s begin by considering a descriptive question about the automaticity literature. What would happen if we came to believe that our actions are mostly driven by nonconscious automatic processes? Or, perhaps more dramatically, what if we came to believe (as suggested by a common interpretation of Wegner) that our intentions are epiphenomenal? Epiphenomenalism is plausibly much more threatening than determinism. But there are a variety of psychological defense mechanisms even here. In general, it seems likely that it will be hard for any psychological or philosophical theory to radically upset our minds. This is all the more true if most of our behavior is automatic. So even though the epiphenomenalist and automaticity hypotheses are depressing, it’s not at all clear that catastrophe looms even here.

But I think that neurotic hand wringing is premature, because I think that the threat of the automaticity literature is less than it seems. Consider the classic Bargh effect: one group of subjects is exposed to words that prime elderly stereotypes (‘grey’, ‘wise’…); when told that the experiment is over, those subjects walk more slowly to the elevator than other subjects. The automatically primed stereotype has a surprising impact on the subjects’ behavior. And subjects are ignorant of this cause, as you discover if you ask them “I noticed that you walked more slowly to the elevator than average, why do you think that is?” Subjects typically have no idea how the priming affected their behavior.

This is a fairly amazing result. But what if, instead of asking subjects why they walked slowly to the elevator we asked them why they walked to the elevator at all. There I predict that virtually everyone will give the same answer – because the experiment is over and that’s how you get out of the building – and this, I submit, is the right answer. They are acting on the basis of reasons and they know the reasons on which they’re acting. While I concede that much of our behavior is driven by automatic processes, I think it’s also true that much of our behavior is driven by reasons, and reasons of which we can be aware. As a result, I’m not inclined to automaticity-inspired neurosis. I suspect that this threat is oversold by the social psychologists.

The work on automaticity is undeniably cool, like so much of social psychology. Social psychology likely contains more surprises than any other area of psychology. But, although I’ve always loved this line of research, I’ve also long been suspicious about the extent to which it paints a representative picture of human psychology. And the suspicion is aggravated by ruminations on the sociology of social psychology. What kinds of results in social psychology are most likely to get published, get attention, produce fame in the academic community? The answer is… surprising results, results that fly in the face of commonsense. Suppose that I do a massive study in which I find powerful correlations between self-report & behavior on the following sorts of items: hunger & eating; wanting to check the mail & checking the mail; intending to go to Sam’s birthday party & going to Sam’s birthday party. In my imagined study, the stats are impeccable, the effect sizes huge. Now I go to the social psychology community. Can I expect to get famous from these results? Surely not. Can I expect that the results will get a lot of attention? Hardly. Can I expect to publish the results in a leading journal? Doubtful. This kind of humdrum commonsense finding just won’t get any serious uptake. But that should make us wary about thinking that the most visible results in social psychology provide a representative characterization of human decision making.

Thanks again for the comments John.
Shaun

[shaunnichols]

Tamler just wrote to tell me it was rude of me to ignore the other comments. Sorry about that! I wasn't ignoring them -- I just got back from a trip last night, and haven't had a chance to read anything yet. (I had John's comments with me, so I was able to read them while I was away.) I will read and respond to the other comments this weekend. shaun

[Tamler Sommers]

Shaun,

When you take etiquette tips from a moral responsibility skeptic, I don't know, that might be a bad sign.

(I didn't actually say it was 'rude.' I hate that word.)

[Paul Torek]

If we ask: “Is the folk concept of free will compatible with determinism?” - is this any different from asking whether free will is compatible with determinism? It could be, if we take the phrase "folk concept of free will" to have a fully operationalized psychological definition. But no one seems to be suggesting that.

If I ask "is the folk concept of 'white' applicable to the substance picked out by the folk term 'snow'," all I've accomplished is a longwinded way of asking whether snow is white. If one is to claim that 'free will' is different, one had better agree with Shaun that this is a term of philosophical art. It's a bit of a borderline case, but I disagree. The term does come up in the court room, too, for example.

[shaun nichols]

Many thanks to the Gardeners for the thoughtful responses. I’m currently writing a book on these issues, so it’s a great help to have the feedback.

There’s already been lots of discussion, so I’ll focus here on the issues on which I think I might have something to say that hasn’t already been covered by other posts in the thread. (In particular, I found the exchanges between Mike, John, Tamler, and Clark very interesting, but I don’t have anything to add.)

Neil raises several interesting points. I’ll take them in the order he presented them. Neil says that we’re “interested in the best systematization of our intuitions in wide reflective equilibrium”, and he rightly notes that the folk aren’t in such equilibrium. I guess I think that that’s *one* thing we’re interested in, but it’s definitely not the only thing I’m interested in when it comes to folk intuitions. I’m equally interested in the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions. For it might turn out that some of our intuitions that inform reflective equilibrium derive from a defective source, hence my recent obsession with genetic arguments. Many religious people might have their beliefs in wide reflective equilibrium, yet if Freud were right about why they have the initial judgment that God exists, then the whole thing would be a house of cards. Knowing why we have the intuitions we do gives us an outside perspective. Now, at least in matters of ethics, I think (and I think this is Neil’s view too), knowing why we have the moral intuitions we do is just one more fact that we throw into the hopper of reflective equilibrium. Simply knowing the source doesn’t trump.
One brief empirical point about the folk and reflective equilibrium. Although people do attempt to avoid explicit inconsistency, sometimes what looks like inconsistency to philosophers apparently doesn’t look like that to the folk. In Knobe’s celebrated finding on intentional action, it turns out that people don’t much change their mind after having the apparent inconsistency pointed out. (Anyway, this is what Joseph Ulatowski and I found in our studies.)

In my paper, I say that a central descriptive question is “is the folk concept of free will compatible with determinism?” Neil correctly points out that I say that “If the answer is yes…then compatibilism is the right view, and determinism does not pose a threat to our current views and practices.” I thought this was innocuous, but Neil takes issue: “I think this is multiply mistaken….Suppose that (a) the folk are incompatibilists but that (b) compatibilism is the right view. In that case, it seems, determinism does not represent a threat to our current practices”
I’m not entirely sure what Neil has in mind here because my conditional says “if the folk concept is compatible, then compatibilism is right”, and Neil’s objection has us suppose that the folk are incompatibilists (which doesn’t match my antecedent).
But in any case, there seem to be two kinds of challenges that Neil might have in mind, so I’ll consider both of them.
1. Suppose that the folk are compatibilists, why does it follow that determinism doesn’t pose a threat to current views and practices? Why can’t incompatibilism be the right view even if the folk concept is compatible? (I think this is Tamler’s interpretation of Neil’s question.)
On this question, I think that Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner say exactly the right thing. If incompatibilism doesn’t have folk intuitions going for it, then it’s not clear why we should believe it. And, as a result, it’s no surprise that incompatibilists (including me) stress the intuitiveness of the view.
2. Is my view committed to the idea that whatever folk intuitions are dictates the truth? Just because the folk are incompatibilists doesn’t preclude the possibility that compatibilism is the right view.
Here I would rely on the distinction between the descriptive project and the substantive & prescriptive projects. I think that for the descriptive project, if we find that folk intuitions are consistently incompatibilist (when performance errors are excluded), then the answer to the descriptive question is that incompatibilism is the folk view. But I certainly don’t think that this is the end of the story. Rather, when we need to decide on the metaphysics or the ethics, then we don’t just listen to the folk. So, for instance, I really like Manuel Vargas’ work here – the folk are incompatibilists, but at the end of the day, we should adopt a revised theory – a compatibilist one.

Neil makes a different criticism of relying on folk intuitions, noting that another approach to getting at folk concepts is to ask which view fits best with folk practices. I have no objection to this approach. And at least when it comes to deciding what to revise or not revise in our notions of responsibility, I definitely want to look closely at the practices. But for the descriptive question, I’m interested in the problem as it comes to us through our intuitions. That’s what got me interested in the problem of free will initially, and so that’s what I’m most keen to understand.

Neil observes that my genetic argument, that we lack good reason for our belief in indeterminist free will, the proper conclusion is agnosticism. Indeed, I expressly say that we don’t have evidence for determinism. I had thought that if we get ourselves to agnosticism via the genetic argument, then Hobbes’ libertarian dilemma would give the nudge to skepticism. Once we see that our belief in libertarian free will is ungrounded, the weirdness of libertarian free will counts as a major strike against it,. Does that seem plausible to others?

The last comment Neil makes is that even if moral responsibility skepticism doesn’t make people change their behavior, it still might be the case that they should change their behavior. I wouldn’t deny this. As Neil writes, social policy shouldn’t be hostage to folk intuition. I fully embrace this view, but I would stress the other direction. Moral responsibility skeptics need to take a more careful look at the relevant evidence (e.g. from sociology) before advocating revolutions in social policy.

Jonathan raises a couple questions about my use of the genetic argument. His second question is akin to Neil’s point (discussed above), so I’ll focus on his first question. Jonathan worries that my use of the genetic argument assumes that Freud is right, and this is widely rejected by philosophers of religion. I take it that there are two issues here. One is the actual psychological proposal made by Freud (i.e., that wish fulfillment generates the belief in God). That is definitely widely disputed, but it isn’t something I need to embrace here. The second issue is Freud’s basic use of a genetic argument, to say that if the belief comes from a mechanism that is known to be unreliable (or perhaps not aimed at the truth), then the beliefs that derive from that mechanism are unjustified. On this question, as far as I know, Freud is on much better ground, but I would be keen to hear if there are objections to this part of the theory. (One misreading of Freud is that he’s saying that, because the belief is produced by wish fulfillment, the belief is *false*. That would be the genetic fallacy. But it isn’t what Freud says. Plantinga recognizes all this in _Warranted Christian Belief_, and goes on to defend religious belief in a characteristically Plantingan way.)

Let’s turn to Kip, who I now realize surpasses Tamler as the most frequent participant at the Garden from the eliminativist camp. I’ll take Kip’s comments by the numbers.
1. Kip wonders why I care about evidence from children. I think evidence from children is important for several reasons, but I’ll list the two that matter most to me. First, children’s views tend to be somewhat less influenced by culture. So, it turns out that many of the things we find 4 year olds doing are culturally universal. More cultural noise gets in as we get older, and children provide one avenue with somewhat less noise. A second reason child studies are helpful is that sometimes philosophical accounts of a concept are incredibly intellectualized. Philosophers tell us that in order to have the concept you need to know X, Y & Z. But in some cases, it’s pretty clear that the child is good with the target concept even though she’s inept at X,, Y, & Z. In the case of free will, this might be an important consideration. If 3.0 year olds are using “could have done otherwise” fluently, then our account of that notion had better not involve concepts or procedures that are beyond the 3 year old.

2. Kip points out that the wording of the questions in our studies would not satisfy conditional analysis enthusiasts. He’s quite right. I’ve talked about this a lot with Eddy. At some point, I’d like to pursue an extended empirical exploration of conditional analysis accounts. (A preliminary version, inspired by Manuel, and presented in response to Eddy is in this paper: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/FreeWillJCCreply.pdf.) But I would also note that really the studies are designed to examine the issue that I find most interesting, which involves a strong notion of determinism. I want to know how people think about that agency and responsibility under that notion, which is admittedly loaded up in ways that make conditional analysts scream.

3. On the terminology, I fear that replacing “libertarian free will” with “magic free will” will not preserve me from both frying pan and fire. But I agree that it would be better not to have to use either label.

4. The demonization idea for how we come to believe in indeterminism is pretty intriguing, but then we will need some story about how it gets generalized.

5. Kip points out that in his previous paper, he advocated an evolutionary explanation for the belief in indeterminism, while in my paper, I promote a cultural explanation in which parents inculcate the idea in their children. Actually, I’ve tried to be neutral on the evolution/culture question. More of this in a second (in 6), but one reason I don’t want to exclude an evolutionary explanation is because I want to allow that perhaps modal concepts have an innate basis. One might well ask why it is that kids find it so easy to acquire modal concepts, and evolutionary nativism is an obvious option.
6. Kip notes that the evolutionary explanation (which he prefers) is vulnerable to findings of cultural diversity. That’s one reason I want to leave the cultural option available.
But I do agree with Kip that the popularity of the belief in free will is supported by lots of different considerations. I’ve just been vexed by how the indeterminism ever got in there. Also, it’s worth noting that “the belief in free will” can encompass lots of factors, and I think it quite possible that some aspects of our view of free will are pancultural and others aren’t. We might find some biases (using the term broadly) have greater impact than others.

8. Here I’m not sure I can do anything other than repeat myself. Kip is convinced by a priori reasons that libertarian free will is impossible. But I think that the a priori reasons can only show that (i) our folk view is conflicted between determinism and indeterminism or (ii) libertarian free will is weird. A libertarian can respond to the first result by saying that the correct way to resolve the conflict is to give up determinism, and he can respond to the second result by pointing to the weird truths of astrophysics and qm. As I said above in response to Neil, I think that once we acknowledge the unwarranted basis for our belief in LFW, the weirdness objection counts heavily against libertarian free will.

9. Will a rejection of LFW impact our lives? I say that the evidence points to a “no” answer. Kip adverts to more recent work pointing in the opposite direction. I’ll definitely have to take a look at the Psych Reports paper he mentioned. But I can comment on the work that Joshua K was referring to at INPC. That’s Schooler’s finding that people who read a compelling description of determinism are more likely to cheat. But there are a couple of reasons not to draw major conclusions from this. First, (and here I’ll sound like Eddy Nahmias), the description Schooler used was not precisely about determinism, but rather a description that suggests that epiphenomenalism is true. Hence, it doesn’t perform the right test – it might just be that anytime we’re led to believe something as deeply depressing as epiphenomenalism, we respond by being less moral (after all, what’s the point?). More significantly though, these are short term responses, and what really matters is long term effects. It might be that the short term cheating would not reflect any long term changes in behavior. And that is what really matters.

10. Kip’s last point is especially interesting to me. First, I had to laugh at his (fair) observation that my view is that “if we abandon retributivism, this might be a mistake on the scale of Soviet communism”. I guess I was a bit dramatic.
And Kip is quite right that the considerations I marshal in favor of retributivism are consequentialist. When it comes to social policy, which is what was under consideration, this seems okay. That is, if the consequences suffice to make the case that we should retain our “retributive” practices, then that’s all I need to challenge the revolutionary. Again, to repeat a point above, the revolutionaries need to pay more attention to the evidence before launching the revolution.
But there’s a deeper issue here that Kip is pointing to – retributivism is not defined consequentially: “Retributivism, in the philosophical sense, is punishment where the punishee’s wrongdoing is a sufficient justification for the punishment.” Am I advocating the retention of these nonconsequentialist norms of retribution? For now, I want to leave that possibility open. I gather that Kip thinks this is philosophically insincere. So let me try at least to defend a veneer of sincerity. I reject moral objectivism, so I needn’t worry that the norms of retribution are *objectively* false. No norm enjoys the sanction of objective truth. But it strikes me that if we give up on objective truth for morality, we might still want to preserve various of our nonconsequentialist moral intuitions. Compare aesthetic judgment. I am fully nonobjectivist about judgments of beauty, and yet I embrace norms about musical beauty, and I won’t give them up just because I recognize that they aren’t objective. I value those norms. Now, the situation is obviously more precarious for moral norms, since lives are at stake. But I would not yet want to exclude the possibility that a perfectly good moral worldview retains nonconsequentialist norms of retribution.

In his post, Paul replies to my claim that “free will” is a term of philosophical art. He points out that it’s a borderline case. So, “white” is definitely not a term of art, whereas, say, “validity” as used in logic is a clear case of a term of art. With those items marking the poles, I would agree with Paul that “free will” falls in between. People do talk about free will when discussing court cases. But often that talk is difficult to interpret – it lends itself to both compatibilist and incompatibilist interpretations. Incompatibilist philosophers wouldn’t be deterred by compatibilist uses of “free will”, and this is because they would allow that the term gets used in different ways. But they’d go on to maintain that what they (the philosophers) mean by “free will” is one particular kind of agency. And typically they think that this view of agency is embraced by the folk. The problem with the phrase “free will” is that it isn’t used in a precise way. Note a similarity with “validity” here – people use that term in many different ways, perhaps none of which corresponds to the logician’s usage. That doesn’t mean that the folk are wrong to say “that’s a valid point”. But it does mean that we can’t ask the folk questions about “valid” if we want to understand the phenomenon of interest to the logician. Crucially, people *do* have a notion that some claims “follow from” other claims, and if we want to understand folk views on logical validity, we’d do better to explore those notions rather than their views about how to use the term “valid”. Correspondingly, I think we do better to ask people whether agency is indeterminist rather than asking them how to use the term “free will”.

Manuel Vargas, the great uniter. As usual, I agree with almost everything he says. He’s right that the distance between Doris and me is not so great. And he’s also right that revisionism provides the bridge between Doris on the one side and Vargas and me on the other. Like Vargas, I think that (i) the folk are responsibility incompatibilists and (ii) they should get over it.
Manuel’s right that my figure would be more representative if I included the revisionist branch. My main reason for not doing so was that the paper is appearing in a book aimed at psychologists, and I worried about laying on more philosophy than absolutely necessary. But to get an accurate representation of the philosophical space, I would definitely want to add Manuel’s branches.
Manuel’s second point is that one might still defend the epistemic interpretation of ‘can’ for children’s usage, along Smart lines. Manuel has put his finger on one of the questions that I currently find most interesting. To defend my view of children on modal concepts, I need to do more to beat back the Smartian analysis. To that end, I’m collaborating with a developmental psychologist, Justin Halberda, to try to show that children’s understanding is not Smartian. But we don’t have the results yet.
Finally, thanks for the pointer to Dan Speak’s work, and thanks again for arranging all of this Manuel!

[Neil]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Shaun. Let me stress that you and I agree that experimental work is interesting and also philosophically valuable. It is philosophically valuable for precisely the reason you give: because we need to understand the sources of our intuitions, and possible distortions of them, in order to be able to utilize them in philosophical argument. So I agree that it would be silly to demand that the folk are in reflective equilibrium, or to think that because they are not we can’t learn anything valuable from their judgments. So far so agreed. Here’s where (I think) we diverge. I take you to think that folk intuitions have a more direct philosophical payoff than I think they do. I take you to say that we can deduce whether compatibilism is true from folk intuitions. And I think that’s false. Let me try to say why, by way of a reply to your points.

First, let me point out, in response to your analogy with religion, that I deny your claim that many religious folk might have their beliefs in wide reflective equilibrium. The word ‘wide’ is doing a lot of work here: beliefs are in reflective equilibrium when they are consistent with our best scientific theories. It’s not an internal harmony that is at issue here. You can’t do WRE by introspection. You may be entirely unable to discover whether your beliefs are in WRE (since knowledge is distributed and cognitive labor is divided). This goes for your claim about the folk and the Knobe effect. We can’t simply discover whether folk judgments are in WRE by pointing out the inconsistency and seeing how they respond. We need to refer to our best theories of intentions as well as to psychological relations of coherence.

You are right in pointing out that I made a leap when I claimed that we cannot move the to . I took you to be also committed to the converse claim: that if the folk are incompatibilists, but our current practices presuppose compatibilism, then our current practices are threatened. If you’re not committed to that, then I don’t see why not. Now, why might our current practices be threatened by determinism, even if the folk are compatibilists? Because incompatibilism could (conceivably) be true. Suppose that we had a practice of sending people to jail on the basis of evidence that is unreliable (we do: it’s called eyewitness testimony), and that most people refused to believe that this kind of evidence is unreliable (they do: they say I know what I saw). The we do the people we send to jail on the basis of this evidence an injustice, no matter how satisfied most people are with the practice (I have no particular wish to defend incompatibilism here, which seems to me even less plausible than compatibilism).

[tnadelhoffer]

Shaun,

In your response to Doris, you explain why you prefer to focus on ascriptions of moral responsibility rather than ascriptions of free will. As far as I can tell, the main problem for this approach is that you must exercise great care to make sure that the intuitions you are tracking are the ones you are after. Keep in mind, if you focus on moral responsibility judgments rather than free will judgments in your efforts to get at whether compatibilism or incompatibilism (or both) best captures folk intuitions, you have to make sure that the participants' responses concerning responsibility are driven by their judgments concerning whether the agent deserves to be punished rather than their judgments concerning whether punishing the agent is the right course of action.

For instance, you ask participants whether they believe a person could be "fully morally responsible" in the universes you describe. The worry is that there is no way of distinguishing from their answers alone whether by "fully morally responsible" they mean (a) the agent deserves to be punished for her actions, or (b) we ought to hold the agent fully responsible for her actions in order to make society safe, etc.

This is something that none of us have been careful enough about as far as I can tell. After all, there are at least two notions of responsibility. On the one hand, there is the retributivist notion--which is based primarily on the idea of desert. On the other hand, there is the consequentialist notion--which is based primarily on deterrence and prevention. This distinction is important for the following reason: While free will may be necesary for the former kind of responsibility, it is surely not necessary for the latter kind. After all, even if none of us had free will, it would nevertheless behoove us to punish people for breaking societal norms--i.e., even absent free will we might decide to hold people fully responsible for their actions so long as they do not have either a justification or an excuse. But given that this is the case, you have to make sure that the answers that participants give to your moral responsibility surveys are driven by the retributivist notion rather than the consequentialist notion--otherwise, their intuitions may not be telling us anything at all about either the compatibility of free will and determinism or about the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility. Instead, we might merely be getting at their intuitions about when we are justified in punishing someone for violating a moral or legal norm. Unfortunately, these intuitions may have little or nothing to do with determinism.

[Saul Smilansky]

The experimental work matters on the free will problem, and it matters more if one believes (like I do) that there are interesting questions beyond the traditional "Is there libertarian/incompatibilist FW?" and the compatibility question; questions such as whether we can live well without belief in LFW, and if not what should or shouldn't be done about it. In any case, this work is interesting and thought-provoking. Some brief thoughts and responses on the "catastrophe" issue:

1. If it appears from experiments that people tend towards "incompatibilism" but many switch over to "compatibilism" when the danger comes closer home, then this seems to me to lend some support to two of the positions I have defended in detail: (a) "dualism" on the compatibility question (for people seem to have both incompatibilist and compatibilist intuitions, perhaps more so than philosophers who typically seem to be monists on one side or the other); and
(b) Illusionism (for people seem to deceive themselves on free will, and this deception appears to be functional).

2. The fact that people don't at once go crazy when they hear about determinism doesn't mean that belief in LFW isn't important, or that if they were to take the doubts seriously this wouldn't matter to them or to the way they function morally. There are many complications here: for example, how much do people *internalize* the threat, how deep (and hence resistant) is the belief in LFW, or what defence mechanisms operate to counter the danger to this belief.

3. Partly for such reasons, I don't find the "classroom" and "but there are nice and normal hard determinists" counterarguments conclusive. This requires a lengthy discussion, but for example it is not clear how much beginning students really internalize what is at stake, which still does not mean that growing social doubts about the relevant beliefs might not erode our moral seriousness or trust in justice, or affect people's sense of achievement or appreciation. Think how long it took for secular beliefs to spread. And professional philosophers typically have or develop a way of dealing with dangerous beliefs that we could hardly trust everyone to do (most people are not so rationalistic/detached).

4. If one thinks that retributivist sentiments are all considered positive, then this again strengthenes the case for maintaining belief in LFW (even if it is false), as support for the retributivist views. And we must not forget that belief in desert does not apply only to the urge to get wrongdoers to suffer, but to belief in "negative desert" whereby the innocent must never be punished because they do not deserve to be (even if the justifying aim of punishment may be consequentialist), or to the belief that some people deserve less punishment because of mitigating circumstances. Such more progressive beliefs also find support from belief in free will, moral responsibility, and desert.

5. The question of culture-relativity can also go in different directions. We might think that certain beliefs (such as the belief that collective punishment is very wrong) are distinctly Western, but also think that they are morally right. Then, we might be only more worried about the dangers to these beliefs, because they may be more fragile just because they are socially particular.

[Eddy Nahmias]

This has been a fascinating discussion and I hope to contribute some more substantial comments soon (I am especially interested in whether people think "free will" is a technical notion or whether it should maintain a significant connection to ordinary usage and intuitions--it sure seems like people in the field write as if it's the latter).

But right now I am trying, along with two of my students, Trevor Kvaran and Justin Coates, to come up with a survey to use for a massive online survey of folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility (for next year's Midwest Studies that will focus on experimental philosophy), and given the discussion going on, it would be relevant to ask for help. Our goal is to test some of the points of contention that have come up so far in these surveys of the folk. We want to find a good description of determinism and then vary features such as concrete, emotion-laden case vs. abstract case, actual world vs. alternate world, and reductionistic description vs. nonreductionistic description.

The modal issues that come up in describing determinism are notoriously difficult, and they are at the heart of my claim that the Nichols and Knobe surveys do not show that the folk have incompatibilist intuitions (for reasons mentioned above by Kip about the conditional analysis but also because their surveys state that in the deterministic world: “given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does” whereas the indeterministic world they contrast it with is described as one where: “She could have decided to have something different" and "in Universe B … each human decision does not have to happen the way it does.” I take these descriptions to beg some important questions against the compatibilist.)

What do people think about the idea of starting off by describing to subjects how deterministic causation works in the physical world, something like this:

"Most scientists believe that every event that happens is completely caused by earlier events. For instance, when a leaf falls from a tree, the specific path it takes is completely caused by the stem breaking off at a certain time, the wind conditions, the force of gravity, and so on. And each of these events is also completely caused by earlier events, and so on going back in time. So, given the specific earlier events (e.g., the stem’s breaking, the wind conditions, etc.), the later event (e.g., the specific path the leaf takes) will happen just the way it does.

1) Do you think scientists are right that earlier events completely cause later events in this way?
2) Assume they are right: If all the earlier events happen just the way they do, then how many different paths might the leaf take? 1, 2, more than 2, infinity."

First, do people think this modal language is too weak? Should it read, "Given the earlier events, the later event *must happen* [or *has to happen*] just the way it does?

If subjects get question 2 wrong, they'd get more explanation and a follow up chance. If they get it right, they would then be given a paragraph that says most psychologists [or neuroscientists in reductionistic version] think the same thing is true of human decision-making, with a description of how the determinism works in that case (including something clarifying that the deterministic causation goes back in time to before the agent is born). Subjects then get a manipulation check parallel to the one above and then the experimental questions about whether the agents have free will, moral responsibility, etc. and also about whether if people believed this were true, it would make their lives less meaningful, make them act less morally, etc. (this is to get at the Smilansky-inspired issues, though the data would be very thin given the reasons discussed above by him and others).

Anyway, what do people think about this way of describing determinism to get subjects to understand it without suggesting contentious features that determinism per se should not suggest? If subjects get the manipulation questions right and still say people are free and responsible, would that convince incompatibilists that the folk don't have (strong) incompatibilist intuitions?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Saul,

I've always found it curious when FW deniers say things like, "[I'm interested] whether we can live well without belief in LFW, and if not what should or shouldn't be done about it." It is the "should" in the second half of that sentence I find especially interesting.

I find it interesting because part of the "free will bundle", at least in my mind, is whether we have the ability to conform our behavior to moral/ethical reasons. If we cannot do *that*, then it seems all the talk of "what should we do if... ?" reduces to "what are we likely to do if... and how we will we feel about ourselves afterward?"

However, it seems like you are after more than that, and yet I doubt whether your CC paradigm is sufficient to support this added weight.

[Saul Smilansky]

Mark,

Let's simplify and think about hard determinism. Even as a hard determinist, I don't see why I should think that I could not conform my behavior to my reasons. I just did, in fact, paying for my diet Sprite because that's the decent thing to do. So I will probably be able to do this tommorow. Unless something very difficult was at issue, or I were particularly weak willed, why should I think that I could not conform? What you describe sounds like fatalism, or pathological passivity/impotence, and I don't see why a hard determinist would believe that about him or herself.

[Saul Smilansky]

Eddy,

I know your question was addressed to everyone, and I am not really competent to reply about the specifics of modality and determinism, or on the relevant considerations as to how best to do experimental surveys, but I do want to say something about your last point, about what would satisfy us descriptive-incompatibilists. One thing that stands out from the previous experimental results and from the discussions is that we (i.e. you, and those others willing to do the hard work) need to work by trial and error, and that things are going to be complicated. So, doing various very different sorts of experiments would be a good idea (easy for me to say, as I don't have to worry about the research budget). Hence I would be eager to see the results of your proposed reasearch. But the thing that would be most convincing for me, I think, would be results of studies that tried to mimic the sort of conversation I would have with someone, when trying to convince him or her of incompatibilism (or at least that there is something important there to worry about). And in such conversations I typically begin by connecting to the moral intuitions in easier, compatibilist-level cases where people lack freedom and moral responsibility. So, I would start by saying something like, "think about this person who does something bad, but then it turns out that he had a brain tumour". The guy would then agree that this person was not morally responsible or blameworthy. Then I would move to cases where the cause was a person's motivation set, and question whether one has ultimate control over one's motivation set. And so on, you can see where I am going. If, after I had connected to the deep moral intuitions, and explained things, the guy gave compatibilist replies, then I would find that hard to dismiss. Hope this is in some way helpful.