Experimental evidence for free will revisionism

Abstract

Philosophers who theorize about whether free will is compatible with causal determinism often rely on ordinary intuitions to bolster their theory. A revisionist theory of free will takes a different approach, saying that the best philosophical theory of what we ought to think about free will conflicts with what we ordinarily do think about free will. I contend that revisionism has not been taken as seriously as should be because philosophers have not realized the extent to which ordinary intuitions are inconsistent. I present an experiment that gives empirical evidence for revisionism. The experiment shows that, in spite of the fact that the ‘is compatible with’ relation is symmetric, folk intuitions change as a function of whether we ask ‘Is determinism compatible with free will?’ versus ‘Is free will compatible with determinism?’ The paper explores possible explanations for why folk intuitions do not mirror the symmetry of the ‘is compatible with’ relation, but regardless of which of these explanations is correct, I argue that we must be revisionists in at least this sense: what we ought to believe about free will cannot include everything we do believe about free will.

Keywords:

• free will
• experimental philosophy
• revisionism
• psychological distance
• construal level theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants at the Experimental Philosophy Society session at the December 2010 American Philosophical Association, the January 2011 Western Experimental Philosophy Workshop, and the March 2011 Midsouth Philosophy Conference. For very thorough feedback, I would especially like to thank Justin Fisher, Joshua Knobe, Ron Mallon, N. Ángel Pinillos, Shaun Nichols, Reuben Stern, Joe Ulatowski, and Russell Warne. Manuel Vargas and two anonymous reviewers of this journal deserve special mention for providing extensive comments that significantly improved the paper. I would also like to thank the dean's office of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University for providing funding to carry out the research.

Notes

This service allows people to sign up to complete tasks (often surveys), often for pay. This survey was restricted to people in the USA who have an approval rating for previous tasks at 95% or higher (162 people took the survey, but 11 surveys were eliminated because the participant did not pass a basic comprehension check). Participants are paid $0.75; since the survey takes less than 5 min, this means they receive above the US federal minimum wage. They range in age from 18–21 to 61–70, with most reporting their age as either 22–30 (28%) or 31–40 (28% also). They range from no high school diploma (1%) to PhD (1%) with most having some college (43%) or a bachelor's degree (32%). Forty-one percent are male and 59% are female.

This paragraph and the next have been greatly improved because of an anonymous reviewer's comments.

Nahmias and Murray (2011) argue that abstraction creates mistaken understandings about the relationship between causal determinism and conscious decisions, but they use a different sense of abstract (lack of a determinate person) than the one in play here (core, higher level features).