Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by the things that happened before. Suppose, for example, that Mia has a bagel for breakfast. Her act of having a bagel for breakfast would be caused by the way things were right before that, which would be caused by the way things were right before that… all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. In this universe, can anyone ever be morally responsible for anything they do?
If you just ask people this question, the overwhelming majority say “No.” This answer seems to align with the philosophical view called incompatibilism – the view that no one can ever be morally responsible for anything they do in a deterministic universe. So the most straightforward way of understanding this result is that people have an incompatibilist intuition.
But some of my fellow experimental philosophers reject this straightforward interpretation. They say that what’s really going on in this case is that people are misunderstanding the question. On this view, when people get a little story about a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by what happened before, they don’t correctly understand what is going on in the story. So the take-home message is not that people have incompatibilist intuitions; it is that we need to change our experimental materials so that people understand them better.
The experimental philosophers who argue for this claim have conducted an impressive program of research. Basically, the key findings come from studies in which researchers present participants with a story about a deterministic universe and then ask questions about what life would be like in the universe. If you do this, you find that people give very extreme answers. People say that life in a deterministic universe would be radically different in all sorts of ways. Most philosophers think that these extreme answers are not true, meaning that people are going wrong in some important respect here.
Okay, so far, so good. If you give people a story about a deterministic universe and ask them what life would be like in that universe, they say some very extreme things that we have good reason to regard as false. But what does that show when it comes to the question about what people really think?
In my opinion, it does not show that we should switch over to different experimental materials. Instead, it suggests that people genuinely do have very extreme views about determinism. If we found a way to switch over to different materials that did not yield these extreme views, we would be switching over to materials that were less accurate in giving us an understanding of what people really think.
Let’s consider an analogy. Suppose we are running studies to understand people’s attitudes about abortion. Now suppose some of our participants say that abortion results in the fetus’s soul going straight to hell, to be tortured for all eternity. We might think that this is a catastrophically false understanding of what abortion is like, but we should not change our study materials to make people stop giving this response. This response is accurately revealing what some people believe about abortion. My point is that the results we get in studies about free will and determinism should be understood in much the same way.
Looking at the actual experimental results, what one sees is that when people are given a story about a deterministic universe, they think that nothing even approaching normal human agency would be possible in this universe. Most strikingly, if you ask them whether the actions of people in this universe depend on their beliefs and values, they explicitly say “No.” In other words, they seem to have a sense that a person living in a deterministic universe would do exactly the same thing even if she had different beliefs and values. (This is such an interesting result! It was first uncovered in the classic paper by Murray and Nahmias linked above, but it has subsequently been replicated in tons of further research.)
Importantly, people only apply this intuition to human actions and not to other types of objects. For example, suppose you instead tell them about a computer and ask whether the computer’s output depends on its data and code. You then get the opposite response. Although people say that a human being’s actions would not depend on her beliefs and values, they say that a computer’s output would depend on its data and code.
The most natural way to interpret this result is that people think that the processes underlying human action are radically different from the processes underlying a computer’s output. If everything were determined, the computer could still work fine, but human action would be fundamentally disrupted.
Further studies suggest that people think certain kinds of actions would be possible in a deterministic universe while others would not. For example, people think it would be possible in a deterministic universe for someone to have a craving for ice cream and then give into it and buy some ice cream, but people think it wouldn’t be possible for someone to have a craving but then resist it and not buy the ice cream.
The most natural way to understand this pattern of judgments is that people have a very extreme incompatibilist view. Not only do they think that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility, they think that determinism is incompatible with the ordinary sort of human agency you might show in resisting a craving for ice cream. To really get to the bottom of this, we should be running further studies that help us understand why people see human agency in this way.
In saying this, I am departing from the usual view within my field. That usual view is that if we find people saying stuff like this, we must be making some kind of error in the way we are designing our studies. So the thought is that we should keep adjusting our experimental materials until we can get people to espouse a view about them that seems more philosophically kosher.
This reaction seems so mistaken to me! We are finding something super interesting here. It might not be what we expected to find when we first started working on these issues, but that just makes it all the more intriguing.
Josh,
These are some interesting thoughts, as always! I wanted to weigh in with a different argument. Thomas Nadelhoffer, Elise Dykhuis, and I have found that participants tend to give *inconsistent* responses when asked about determinism. In one study, a decent percentage of participants agreed to the following set of statements:
– It doesn’t make any sense to say that [PERSON] made his own choice to [ACTION].
– [PERSON] will [ACTION] no matter what.
– There was at least a slight chance that [PERSON] could have chosen not to [ACTION] even if everything (including the laws of nature) had been exactly the same prior to his decision.
To me (and Thomas and Elise) it’s completely unclear how to make those claims consistent. Our conclusion was that people don’t know what they’re talking about, and so there is no “folk view” of determinism to be understood (and, hence, no folk view of incompatibilism or compatibilism). No need to rehearse the argument here, but that seems different than the argument you address in the post.
The abortion analogy is instructive. In my case, it would be like participants responding that abortion: (1) violates the fetus’ right to life, and; (2) abortion does not involve killing anything. Of course, it could be that a participant has a very sophisticated view where a right to life can be violated in the absence of being killed, but the more natural interpretation (to me) is that the person doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.
Anyway, curious to hear if you think our consistency argument is sufficiently distinct from the argument you address above!
Hi Sam,
Great to hear from you! I absolutely love your work on this topic, and I’m so happy that you are joining this conversation.
The view that you articulate here is *exactly* my view. In recent work, I have argued that people have conflicting intuitions about these cases. That is, they have an incompatibilist intuition, and they also have a compatibilist intuition.
On this view, the fact that people show conflicting intuitions in these studies does not mean that we should try to adjust our stimuli. Rather, we are correctly measuring what we wanted to measure. People genuinely do have conflicting intuitions, and the method used in the experiments is accurately capturing that conflict.
I’d love to continue the conversation for another round or two, but before we proceed any further, are we on the same page about all of this?
Hey Josh,
I’ll have to look at the new paper! I agree that people could have conflicting intuitions (and that the linked studies are measuring these conflicts). My claim–expressed poorly in my previous post–was that there are two possible interpretations of the literature:
1) People genuinely have conflicting intuitions about determinism and agency, and so across studies people will make conflicting judgments about determinism and agency.
2) People do not have a concept of determinism (unless they’ve taken a philosophy class), and so across studies people will make conflicting judgments about determinism and agency.
We both agree that there’s no sense altering the experimental design, but we get there for very different reasons. The difference seems to turn on whether we think there is a folk concept of determinism. The contradictory responses were supposed to be evidence that there is no folk concept.
But perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point about conflicting intuitions?
Hi Sam,
This is fantastically helpful, thanks!
You are completely right that I was proposing (1), but I appreciate your defense of (2). This is a very good question. I wonder what evidence might be helpful to us in trying to evaluate these different options?
This isn’t about the evidence, but just to explain how I was understanding (1): I was thinking that the folk have the same exact intuitions that philosophers have. A philosopher might start out with both incompatibilist intuitions and compatibilist intuitions, feel puzzled by this conflict and then spend the next few decades trying to get to the bottom of it. The basic picture I was having is that the conflict we see in philosophers is also apparent in the folk; it’s just that most ordinary folks don’t feel puzzled and don’t spend years trying to resolve their puzzlement.
Josh,
This helps to clear things up, thanks! It’s an interesting question how to adjudicate between (1) and (2). Surely we can agree that there might be no folk concept of something (e.g., nuclear fission) other cases where there clearly are folk concepts (e.g., love or happiness) and boundary cases where it’s unclear whether there are folk concepts. I’d argue that ‘socialism’ is a nice example of the last category.
But, you’re right that merely inconsistent responding is insufficient to infer that there’s no folk concept: people might give inconsistent responses under some conditions where they *do* have the relevant concept in some way. I’d have to think more about what else could help sort this out!
Sam,
Great talking with you about all this. I am super open to either option, but just in case it’s helpful, I wanted to mention that the claim I was making about free will intuitions is part of a much larger claim about intuitions regarding philosophical problems.
The basic idea is that part of why we see certain things as ‘problems ‘is that we have conflicting intuitions about them. So the idea is that people also have conflicting intuition about lots of other philosophical problems (the trolley problem, Twin Earth, the Ship of Theseus, philosophy of art, philosophy of law…). On this view, the claim that people have conflicting intuition about free will and determinism would not involve anything special about determinism in particular.