Flickers of Freedom

Intuitions and Audiences in Debates over Manipulation Arguments

Derk Pereboom and I agree that the audience whose intuitions should matter in our PPR debate over his version of the manipulation argument--his Four Case argument--is the audience of open-minded and undecided inquirers.  These inquirers are undecided about whether determinism undermines freedom and responsibility, and they are open to persuasion by further clarifying considerations.  Upon first being confronted with the thesis of determinism, and reflecting upon the nature and conditions of moral responsibility, they are willing to acknowledge that determinism might well pose a threat.  But they are neither natural compatibilists nor natural incompatibilists--that is, they are not prepared to respond to the apparent puzzle by committing to either of the opposing standard positions.  Note, furthermore, that Pereboom and I are imagining our audience to be pre-theoretically unpolluted; they've not been influenced by details of and reflection on the philosophical debate.  In this way, their intuitions about cases provide probative evidence speaking for or against compatibilism or incompatibilism.

Given this way of framing the debate, Pereboom takes cases like his Case 1 (Plum manipulated moment to moment to satisfy putative compatibilist sufficient conditions whereby he kills Ms. White) and his Case 2 (Plum manipulated at birth from a temporal distance to kill Ms. White) to be clarifying considerations.   When presented to an audience of undecided inquirers, these cases make vivid hidden causes, as Spinoza would wish to emphasize, and thereby make clear what is going on in the normal deterministic cases as well.  Pereboom contends that, given this audience, and in response to reflection upon these cases, they will and ought to move in the direction of assigning greater credence to incompatibilism.  So, to cut to the chase, he wins and I lose. (This is only one of his points against me, but it is the one I want to focus upon.)

One way I have tied to resist Pereboom is by attending to cases that are closer to ordinary life cases, cases like Pereboom's Case 3 (Plum exposed to an indoctrinating environment during his upbringing).  And I have dawn especially on cases like those Nomy Arpaly discusses, cases where something dramatic happens to a person, but in a way that leaves relevant features of her agency unimpaired, and causes changes so dramatic that a person then acts very differently than she otherwise would.  Examples she offers are cases of religious conversion and the overwhelming life-altering love some parents report when their children are born.  These cases, Arpaly and I think, do not confirm an incompatibilist diagnosis, and I say, in resistance to Pereboom, should count as clarifying considerations speaking on behalf of compatibilism, or at least against incompatibilism and so for retention of an agnostic stance. 

Now, here is what I am especially interested in discussing.  I believe that we have good philosophical reason to favor somewhat, or weigh more heavily, the intuitions elicited from closer-to-life cases as in comparison with those that are further away.  The ones further away are less reliable guides to testing our conceptual competence and to informing the role of the pertinent concepts in our properly functioning application of them.  So, suppose cases like Pereboom's Case 1 and Case 2 count as clarifying considerations moving an undecided audience to up its credence in the direction of incompatibilism *more strongly* than cases like my preferred Arpaly-cases move this same audience to lower its credence away from a judgment of incompatibilism.  Should this count as a win for the incompatibilist?  I do not think so, since as philosophers we should look more skeptically at the evidence elicited from the more bizarre cases when weighed against those that are closer to real life cases. If I am correct, then I do not think Pereboom can claim victory in his debate with me. 

Here are four comments on this last paragraph: First, I've got no good argument for this thing I believe about the relative value of intuitions about these cases.  It's a philosophical hunch.  Any ideas?  Second, note that if I am correct, this adds an interesting layer to the work done by x-phi folks.  They'll need to evaluate in different ways the results of studies involving vignettes that are closer to real life cases as in comparison with those that are more bizarre.  Third, all of this just assumes that we have a shared notion of what intuitions are and how they help us in philosophical theorizing.  But I suspect we have no shared consensus at all on what the hell they are (been reading an excellent book on this by Herman Cappelen).  Fourth, Pereboom and I favor the intuitions of the theoretically unpolluted, but is this just reckless?  Consider Mele, who instead advises that we consider the judgments about cases not of the uninitiated, but of theorists who are agnostic but who have thought long and hard about this issue. 

 

Varieties of Understanding

Fordham's Stephen Grimm asked me to post the following announcement:

Fordham recently received a 3.56 million dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation to help support a project called "Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology."  Funding opportunities in philosophy and psychology are available, and I'm trying to spread the word about that.

The website for the grant is here, and the Fordham press release is here.

Here's also a brief description:

Fordham's "Varieties of Understanding" Project

The Philosophy Department at Fordham University is pleased to announce its three-year “Varieties of Understanding” project. 

The project will sponsor research in psychology, philosophy, and theology that will examine the various ways in which human beings understand the world, how these various types of understanding might be improved, and how they might be combined with one another to produce an integrated understanding of the world.

For more details, and for information on how to apply for funding, please see the project website: www.varietiesofunderstanding.com 

The project is supported by a 3.56 million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the Henry Luce Foundation, Fordham University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Thanks!  And just let me know if you have any questions.

Perceptions of Having Free Will : Recent Findings in Social Psychology

Much of the social psychology literature has focused on the consequences of believing in free will. This line of research generally likes to show that believing in free will has all sorts of positive implications in terms of prosocial behavior (Baumeister, Masicampo, & Dewall, 2009), less cheating (Vohs & Schooler, 2008) and even better job performance (Stillman, Baumeister, Vohs, Lambert, Fincham and Brewer, 2010). But how are those perceptions formed? are those beliefs stable? are they prone to classic social psycholog biases? are they perhaps contextually bound?

This post is a cross post of a quick summary I did titled "Free Will : Interesting Findings in Social Psychology" which includes some of the recent findings regarding the antecedents of belief in free will and the factors that influence these perceptions. I believe this line of research resembles and is linked to some of what experimental philosphers have been doing on lay beliefs of moral responsibility and intent.

Emotional Responses Survey Results (Eli Weber, guest poster)

Here is Eli's discussion of the survey results:

Thanks again to everyone who took the emotional responses survey.  Below are the cases and response data for the first 100 responses.  I’ve given a bit of analysis following each case, and there are some general remarks following that.  First, I wanted to say just a bit about what I was up to here.

Nahmias and King in The Philosophers' Magazine

The Philosophers Magazine has two new book reviews:  The first is a review by our own Eddy Nahmias of Sam Harris's "pithy pamphlet" Free Will.  The second is a review by Matt King of our own Tamler Sommers's Relative Justice.

3:AM Interview with Pierce

3:AM's Richard Marshall has posted yet another interesting interview--this time, with Bryony Pierce. If you haven't already checked out some of Marshall's earlier interviews, they are all excellent--much like this one!

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 Emotion

Just wanted to put up a quick note about an exciting new study on the relationship between people's emotions and their intuitions about free will.

It has often been suggested that people's belief in free will is affected in some way by their emotions. (For example, it might be that people are drawn to believe in free will because they are angered by certain wrong-doers and therefore motivated to believe that these wrong-doers are blameworthy.) Florian Cova and colleagues set out to test this hypothesis using a surprising new method. They found participants who suffered from a blunting in emotional response due to frontotemporal dementia and then checked to see how those participants thought about free will. The results were quite surprising...

Crowd-sourcing my SPA Remarks

At the annual International Free Will Conference (you know, the Pacific APA), the Society for the Philosophy of Agency is having its inaugural meeting. There’s going to be a panel discussion on the State of the Field, and I’m tasked with talking about free will. Among the things I’m supposed to be ready to talk about are the current central issues in debates about free will, interesting developments, and emerging topics over the next 5+ years.

For the talk, I thought about consulting my intuitions on the matters. However, I’ve been told that my intuitions are generally defective. So, I thought I should do some Serious Experimental work and just ask you, dear blog reader, what you think about these matters. I can’t promise that I will use your remarks in my talk, but I can’t promise that I won’t. I can promise that I won't run a regression analysis on the frequency of various remarks.

So I bleg of you: what do you think is Big Time in free will, what’s new and exciting to you, and what do you think will be Big Time in 5+ years? 

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy

Oxford University Press has started up the new series Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Each volume will consist of a series of new papers in the field of experimental philosophy. 

The Call for Abstracts for the first volume is now available. So if you are interested in contributing, all you need to do is send in a brief (less than 1,000 word) abstract by Dec. 15. Papers can present new experimental findings or examine the philosophical implications of existing studies. Criticisms of experimental philosophy are always welcome. 

Existing research in experimental philosophy has often focused on questions about free will (see this quick bibliography), and it would be great to have some submissions from Flickerers in this new volume!