Flickers of Freedom

Attributability and Daddy Issues

I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility.  The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means.  Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest.  One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments.  I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.

Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention

Several people have asked me to send them a copy of the dialogue I presented (with the generous help of Josh Weisberg) at the XPS group session in Seattle. So I figured I would post it here.

Comments welcome, either on the blog or in an email.  Please note that the remarks of Friend 2 do not necessarily represent those of the author.  

 Download Free Will and Experimental Philosophy, an intervention.  

Clark on Waller's Semi-Compatibilism (in Reverse)

Bruce Waller recently published an interesting new book entitled Against Moral Responsibility (MIT Press).  I am only half way through the book right now myself, but I think thus far Waller has done a nice job of motivating skepticism about desert-entailing moral responsibility.  Fortunately, Tom Clark has written up a great review over at Naturalism.org.  So, check it out here.

Experiment Month is Back!

 

Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the plan for your experiment to Experiment Month. Then, if your submission is accepted, the staff will help you out with the more technical side of running the study. More specifically:

• If you think it might be helpful, staff members will connect you with an 'experiment buddy' who will help you out with experimental design. 
• Once the design is complete, the staff will run your experiment online and send you the data.
• Finally, staff members will help you with the statistics needed to analyze your data and see whether your hypothesis was confirmed.

To get a better sense of how this project has gone in the past, check out this summary of what ended up happening for the philosophers who submitted last year.

Free Will and Consciousness: Experimental Studies

An excellent paper with this title is now published online at Consciousness and Cognition.  It is by Joshua Shepard, a graduate student at FSU. The paper is here, but if your institution does not allow you access, you can email Joshua for a copy at jls09k at fsu dot edu

Joshua's experiments suggest (at least) these two interesting results about people's understanding of free will:

1. Free will is strongly connected to consciousness, such that people are likely to attribute free will and responsibility to agents and actions when the agents' conscious processes play a role in action, even in cases where determinism is stipulated; and people are unlikely to attribute FW and MR when unconscious processes are emphasized.  And these results seem to wash out differences between descriptions in terms of brain mechanisms vs. psychological processes (and hence probably offer a better explanation for my prior results in terms of that contrast, which is consistent with what I actually think is going on).

2. People are much more likely to attribute FW and MR to agents when they agree with the information described in the scenarios, an important finding that calls out for more research (it's one I've noticed but not analyzed in my experiments).  When they disagree with determinstic descriptions, they are more likely to offer incompatibilist responses.

I hope people will check it out and begin some conversations here.

After the Free Will Renaissance

Some folks who weren't going to be attending the Pacific APA asked me to post my SPA Meeting remarks on the future of the free will debate (thanks Andrei and Luca for organizing that session!). For those interested, here were the core of those remarks: 

1. The past 40 years of work on free will work has been dominated by philosophers working out the consequences of a problematic given to us by the Great Trinity
2. We’re approaching Event Horizon for that work, i.e., the point where that work will have significantly less visible influence on subsequent generations. 
3. What comes next is hard to see, and indeed, it is entertaining but Ultimately Fruitless to speculate about what comes next.  
4. However, since reality is no constraint on The Provocative, I’ve made some prognostications that are at least as plausible as any random selection of theses 

For the details, read on.