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2013 Free Will in Context: A Defense of Descriptive Variantism Jason S. Miller

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

FREE WILL IN CONTEXT:

A DEFENSE OF DESCRIPTIVE VARIANTISM

By

JASON S. MILLER

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2013

Jason S. Miller defended this dissertation on July 30, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Alfred R. Mele Professor Directing Dissertation

Michael P. Kaschak University Representative

Michael A. Bishop Committee Member

Randolph K. Clarke Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, for all they’ve done for me, and to Jarvis and Scarlet, for all they’ll do for others.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is, unfortunately, impossible to thank everyone to whom I am indebted for their help and support on this project without making this section a chapter in its own right. Still, I would like to mention a few of the people whose influence on my dissertation, and the writing of it, has been especially great. First, I’d like to thank my committee members – Al Mele, Mike Bishop, Randy Clarke, and Mike Kaschak – for their assistance with this project, and for kindly putting up with how long it took me to write it. Special thanks are due to Al, whose comments on earlier versions of each chapter have resulted in numerous improvements. (Any remaining inadequacies are, of course, wholly my own.) I’d also like to thank Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas for their help throughout this process, and for comments on earlier drafts; the influence of Michael’s graduate seminars, along with Randy’s and Al’s, on this dissertation will be evident to anyone who was present for them. For additional assistance from outside Tallahassee, including correspondence, comments on written work, and some excellent discussions, I’d like to thank Adam Feltz, Andrew Monroe, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and all of the participants in the free will conferences hosted here in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2013. (The last two of these were supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.) Thanks also to everyone in the Philosophy Department here at Florida State University for their help with this project, and for making life as a graduate student tolerable. Jeremy Johnson, Rachel Baker, Doug Bowen, Ben Miller, and especially Karen Foulke have my sincere gratitude for keeping this place running smoothly, which I’m sure is much harder than you all made it look. Without several of the past and current graduate students here, I could never have finished this dissertation. Those to whom I am especially indebted in this regard include (alphabetically) Rich Cordero, Zach Martin, Heather Perez, Clifford Sosis, and Aron Vadakin, along with some of the people mentioned above. I’m also particularly grateful to Jamie Feldman (no, I didn’t forget) for all of her help over the last several years.

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To my family: James, thanks for putting up with all of us, and especially me. Jon and Chrysten, thanks for letting me hang out with the world’s coolest nephew; I look forward to doing the same with the world’s coolest niece. Jarvis, thanks for being the world’s coolest nephew, and Scarlet, you’re about as old as my completed dissertation, but I’m sure you’ll be the world’s coolest niece. To Jackson, Stephanie, Jules, and especially Sam, thanks for being there. Thanks also to the rest of my extended family, who I’d list here if I hadn’t already gone on too long. Finally, to my grandparents – all five of them – thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me. Mike and Pat, I miss you. And again, Mom and Dad – thanks.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii ABSTRACT ...... ix 1. THE COMPATIBILITY QUESTION ...... 1 1.1 Prolegomena ...... 3 1.2 Descriptive and Prescriptive Questions ...... 8 1.3 Coming Attractions ...... 13 2. REFRAMING THE QUESTION ...... 17 2.1 Refining the Descriptive Question ...... 18 2.2 Descriptive Hypotheses: A Debate ...... 22 2.3 Burdens of Proof ...... 25 2.4 Descriptive Commitments ...... 33 3. DESCRIPTIVE VARIANTISM ...... 39 3.1 Evidence for Descriptive Invariantism ...... 40 3.2 Evidence for Descriptive Variantism ...... 45 3.3 Objections and Replies ...... 50 4. AFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE ERRORS ...... 57 4.1 Affect vs. Abstraction ...... 58 4.2 Affective Performance Errors ...... 64 4.3 Evaluating the Affective Performance Error Hypothesis ...... 68 5. ABSTRACT PERFORMANCE ERRORS...... 77 5.1 The Bypassing Hypothesis ...... 78 5.2 The Many Faces of Bypassing ...... 87 5.3 Bypassing: Cause or Effect? ...... 93 6. THE FUTURE OF DESCRIPTIVE VARIANTISM ...... 108 6.1 The Persistence of Contextual Variation ...... 109 6.2 Implications for Future Work ...... 117 APPENDICES ...... 126 A. COPYRIGHT PERMISSION FOR FIGURE ONE ...... 126

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B. COPYRIGHT PERMISSION FOR FIGURE THREE ...... 132 REFERENCES ...... 138 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 152

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LIST OF FIGURES

1. Nichols and Knobe (2007) study 2 results ...... 66

2. The form of mediation analysis ...... 83

3. MR/FW and Bypassing scores in Murray and Nahmias’s studies 1 and 2 ...... 86

4. Hypotheses on the causal relationships between scenario, bypassing, and MR/FW ...... 95

5. Possible views on free will ...... 119

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ABSTRACT

Are free will and determinism compatible? Philosophical focus on this deceptively simple ‘compatibility question’ has historically been so pervasive that the entire free will debate is now standardly framed in its terms – that is, as a dispute between compatibilists, who answer the question affirmatively, and incompatibilists, who respond in the negative. This dissertation, in contrast, adopts a position that I call ‘descriptive variantism,’ according to which prevailing notions of free will exhibit significant aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism. My formulation and defense of this position provides a framework for considering several important issues that cannot be adequately addressed on the traditional conception of the free will debate. The theoretical advantages of descriptive variantism become apparent, I argue, only after adopting needed refinements to the compatibility question itself. As it stands, this question conflates at least two distinct issues: whether free will, as ordinarily understood, does in fact conflict with determinism, and whether free will should be taken to involve such a conflict. The vast majority of work in this area, I maintain, implies that (a) the shared notion of free will exemplified in everyday usage conforms exclusively to either compatibilism or incompatibilism, and (b) the (singular) position suggested by this shared notion constitutes the most adequate response to the compatibility question. This is a mistake: it ignores several other possibilities, among them the prospect that multiple ‘shared notions’ are implicated in the complex network of judgments, attitudes, and social practices related to free will. Having reformulated various aspects of the free will debate in ways that address these issues, I go on to argue that no single account of free will can underwrite the broad range of phenomena associated with this notion. Most importantly, I maintain that contextual features, especially those related to abstraction and concreteness, engender significantly different notions of free will: abstract contexts tend to elicit judgments and other behaviors conducive to incompatibilism, while concreteness often promotes tendencies best captured by compatibilist theories. I support these empirical claims primarily by drawing out the conceptual implications of recent experimental work on these topics in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and defend my interpretation against alternative accounts that purport to ‘explain away’ the contextual differences exhibited in the experimental data.

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If these claims are correct, then the fundamental conflicts inherent in prevailing notions of free will have the potential to manifest themselves in some highly problematic ways. For example, criminal laws enacted in abstract contexts may presuppose constraints on free agency deeply at odds with those implicitly adopted by jurors evaluating concrete violations of these laws. I attempt to make some preliminary progress on these vexing, but vital, issues by suggesting that revision towards compatibilism represents an initially appealing method of resolving some of these practical difficulties. Importantly, though, this suggestion is tentative, particularly insofar as the extent to which such revision is ultimately desirable, feasible, or even psychologically possible remains unclear. Further consideration of these issues thus constitutes an important avenue for future research.

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CHAPTER ONE:

THE COMPATIBILITY QUESTION

I’d like to begin this dissertation by considering a pair of passages that, in my view, nicely illustrate some of the ideas that will be at the forefront of the ensuing discussion. The first is from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. …It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction…, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of…the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty.) (Wittgenstein 2001, 42e)1

In many ways, the present study represents an attempt to take these comments seriously. While I don’t believe that philosophy can only ‘describe’ the actual use of language,2 I do think that in many cases the best place to begin theorizing is at the descriptive level. Here, I hope to do precisely this with respect to the topic of free will. My aim is to set out an adequate descriptive foundation for philosophical accounts of this topic by examining the ‘actual use’ of both language and other practices (e.g. social and interpersonal practices) relevant to it. In pursuing this aim, I hope to ‘get a clear view’ of some troubling ‘contradictions’ that, as it turns out, are deeply rooted in pretheoretic notions of free agency. Adequately elucidating these contradictions is a complex matter, and one that is considered at length in the following pages. However, some hints at their nature can be brought out by examining a second passage, from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson; the selection includes portions of a debate between the author and Samuel Johnson regarding the putative compatibility of free will with divine foreknowledge:

1 In other editions of Philosophical Investigations, this passage can be found at §§124-5. 2 See section 6.2, and the closing remarks to this chapter, for some indication of how and why I disagree with Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘philosophy may in no way interfere with’ actual language use. 1

JOHNSON. ‘You are surer that you are free, than you are of prescience; you are surer that you can lift up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any conclusion from a deduction of reasoning. …If I am well acquainted with a man, I can judge with great probability how he will act in any case, without his being restrained by my judging. GOD may have this probability increased to certainty.’ BOSWELL. ‘When it is increased to certainty, freedom ceases… if it be certain at the time, it is a contradiction in terms to maintain that there can be afterwards any contingency dependent upon the exercise of will or any thing else.’ JOHNSON. ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.’—I did not push the subject any farther. I was glad to find him so mild in discussing a question of the most abstract nature…which he generally would not suffer to be in any degree opposed. (Boswell 1998, 947, emphasis in original)3

Notice how Boswell’s focus on abstraction opposes Johnson’s concrete remarks. While the former highlights some very general issues relevant to the topic at hand, and is happy to find Johnson willing to discuss issues of such an ‘abstract nature,’ the latter contrasts particular judgments about Boswell’s own actions with those concerning abstract ‘deduction[s] of reasoning,’ and sides with concrete ‘experience[s] for’ free will over abstract ‘theory against’ it. Perhaps the most central moral of the present study is that, given these respective emphases, it is not surprising to find Johnson defending compatibilism against Boswell’s incompatibilist arguments. These correlations between compatibilism and concreteness and, correspondingly, between incompatibilism and abstraction are, I will argue, deeply embedded in pretheoretic beliefs and practices relevant to free will.4 In light of these preliminary comments, this dissertation may be understood as, roughly, an attempt to apply Wittgenstein’s methodology to the conflicts exhibited in the debate between Johnson and Boswell. Somewhat less obliquely, in the following pages I conduct a philosophical analysis of pretheoretic notions of free will that focuses primarily on the implications of these

3 In other editions of Boswell’s work, the passage may be found in his entry for Wednesday, 15 April 1778, Aetat. 69. Note that this passage is, unfortunately, excluded from most of the abridged versions of Boswell’s work. 4 This paragraph contains several technical terms that are addressed later in this chapter. In particular, ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ are defined momentarily (although they are treated as theses about the relationship between free will and causal determinism rather than that between the former and divine foreknowledge), and what, in my view, counts as ‘pretheoretic’ is addressed at the beginning of section 1.2. 2

notions for the ‘compatibility question’ – that is, the question of whether free will is or is not compatible with the truth of causal determinism. In conducting this analysis, which proceeds mainly (but not exclusively) via investigation of empirical data, I present and defend one version of a position that I call ‘descriptive variantism.’5 On this view, prevailing notions of free will exhibit significant aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism. More specifically, I argue that contextual features, especially those related to abstraction and concreteness, often engender significantly different ideas about free will among non-philosophers: abstract contexts tend to increase the relative frequency of judgments and other behaviors conducive to incompatibilism, while concreteness often promotes tendencies best captured by compatibilist theories. If this is right, then the disagreement between Bowell and Johnson is but one of the many cases in which contextual differences can lead to conflicts with respect to pretheoretic notions of free agency. The present chapter, which is divided into three sections, sets the stage for my discussion of these issues. The first two sections lay some of the groundwork necessary for the ensuing discussion; both define some central terminology, and the second offers some initial motivation for – and a brief defense of – the project pursued here. The third section previews the arguments to come; there, I summarize the discussion included in each of the following chapters.

1.1 Prolegomena

As readers familiar with the contemporary philosophical literature on free will are no doubt aware, most recent treatments of this topic do not (pace Boswell and Johnson) directly address the problem of divine foreknowledge. Rather, they often focus primarily on a specific version of what Kane calls the “Compatibility Question”:

Is free will compatible with determinism? (Kane 1996, 13)

The ensuing discussion follows most contemporary theorists in emphasizing this question, although it does so from a rather unconventional perspective. Consequently, my goals in this

5 This label is adapted from related terminology introduced in Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk (2007). See section 6.2 for some brief discussion of how my version of descriptive variantism differs from the variantist position outlined by these authors. 3

section and the next are twofold. I begin, in this section, by characterizing several aspects of the traditional framework surrounding the compatibility question, where the ‘traditional’ framework is the one within which the majority of philosophical work on free will in the last several decades has operated, and for the most part continues to operate. In section two, I address a few of the key areas in which the treatment provided here departs from this traditional framework. To begin, then, note that much of the recent work on free will in general, and on the compatibility question in particular, has sought to address the relationship between free will and a particular variety of determinism – viz. causal determinism, understood as the thesis that “there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future” (van Inwagen 1983, 3). More completely, causal determinism is true if and only if a complete description of the state of the world at any time t, in conjunction with a complete statement of the laws of nature, entails all true statements about any future time.6 In addition to being a central focus of many recent theoretical treatments of free will, causal determinism as formulated here is also at the forefront of much of the contemporary empirical research into the compatibility question. In this and forthcoming chapters, I follow tradition in focusing on determinism in this causal sense. Consequently, I henceforth adopt the following terminological conventions: unless explicitly noted otherwise, references to ‘determinism’ concern causal determinism as defined immediately above, and discussion of the ‘compatibility question’ addresses a version of that question on which it is causal determinism that is at issue. ‘Free will,’ for its part, seems to be typically interpreted by most theorists as involving, roughly, the power or ability to act freely;7 having such a power or ability is generally understood to involve having certain types or degrees of control over one’s actions. The nature of the requisite control is commonly disputed, but oft-proposed candidates include such things as that one’s action be produced in accordance with a certain type of causal process, that one have a suitable variety of access to alternative possibilities with respect to one’s action (i.e. that one

6 Cf. Mele (2006, 3), where determinism is characterized as the thesis that “at any instant exactly one future is compatible with the state of the universe at that instant and the laws of nature.” As Mele notes there, “an exception may be made for instants at or near the time of the big bang” (2006, 3). 7 On the connection between free will and free action, again see Mele (2006, 16–17). Note that it is, as Mele points out, often unclear exactly what some authors mean by ‘free will,’ but I take it that something like the characterization offered above will do for present purposes. At any rate, much of the ensuing discussion can proceed without a very exact definition of ‘free will,’ since it addresses the content of pretheoretic thought relevant to just this notion. In the present context, then, it would beg the question to offer any specific definition of ‘free will’ intended to apply to pretheoretic usage; this issue should be investigated rather than stipulated. 4

‘could have done otherwise’), or that one is the ‘source’ of one’s action in an appropriate way. While detailed discussion of these different varieties of control is outside the scope of the present investigation, I do follow earlier theorists in speaking of ‘free will’ in terms of both free action and control. In particular, I henceforth treat ‘free agency,’ ‘free action,’ and their cognates as roughly synonymous with ‘free will’ and its cognates; this is true both in discussing particular actions – e.g. ‘S had free will/acted freely with respect to her A-ing at t’ – and when considering general abilities – e.g. ‘S has free will/free agency in world W.’ Historically, the vast majority of accounts addressing the putative compatibility of free will with causal determinism have answered the compatibility question in a manner that accords with the following framework. Those who answer the compatibility question in the negative are incompatibilists; they hold that (causal) determinism would, if true, preclude free will. Compatibilists instead answer this question affirmatively; they hold that incompatibilism is false – i.e., that (causal) determinism is consistent with free will. Most, but not all, compatibilists also hold that some actual human beings sometimes have free will; on the other hand, most current compatibilists do not endorse the claim that determinism is true. Rather, they are committed only to the claim that if it were true, this fact in itself would not suffice to show that no one ever acts freely. This is often in deference to ongoing work on quantum mechanics, which many view as either leaving the question of the truth of determinism unsettled or actually inclining the balance of evidence towards its falsity.8 Incompatibilists, for their part, may be generally divided into a few additional subgroups. Libertarians typically conjoin incompatibilism with the claim that some actual human beings sometimes have free will; it follows from this that typical libertarians are committed to the falsity of determinism.9 The following terminology is commonly applied to those incompatibilists who hold that no actual human beings ever act freely: hard determinists hold that no actual human beings ever act freely because determinism is true; hard incompatibilists claim that no actual human beings ever act freely whether or not determinism is true; and impossibilists hold that

8 On the implications of contemporary theories in physics for the truth or falsity of determinism, see the essays in part II of Kane (2011); these include Hodgson (2011), Bishop (2011), and Bishop and Atmanspacher (2011). Note also that earlier compatibilists sometimes did hold that determinism is true, or even that its truth is required for free will (see, e.g., Hobart (2008) and Ayer (1954)), but these views are not popular among contemporary compatibilists. 9 There are a few additional complexities in the background here; for example, some philosophers (e.g. Dennett (1978) and Mele (1995; 2006)) have developed libertarian theories without themselves being libertarians. (Dennett is a compatibilist; Mele is agnostic with respect to whether compatibilism or libertarianism is true.) Nonetheless, the characterization of libertarianism offered here should suffice for present purposes. 5

acting freely is impossible because the notion of ‘free will’ is itself somehow incoherent or otherwise unsatisfiable.10 While the ensuing discussion focuses primarily on the general distinction between compatibilism and incompatibilism, rather than the more finely-grained differences between various incarnations of both positions, it will become apparent in the course of this discussion that evidence overwhelmingly indicates that pretheoretic thought about free will includes a commitment to the claim that some of us sometimes act freely. Thus, when I say that pretheoretic notions of free will exhibit aspects of both compatibilism and incompatibilism, each of these aspects is most plausibly interpreted as being conjoined with the view that some actual human beings have free will. One consequence of this is that folk tendencies toward incompatibilism are probably, in general, also tendencies toward libertarianism. That is, most people whose intuitions imply that determinism precludes free will also tend to judge that some of us are free; these claims together imply that determinism is false of us (and thus that libertarianism is true).11 One final clarification regarding the positions traditionally adopted in response to the compatibility question is in order. This is that most theorists agree that having performed an action freely is a necessary condition of being directly morally responsible for that action. (An agent S is ‘directly’ morally responsible for her action A to the extent that (a) S is morally responsible for A and (b) S’s being morally responsible for A does not depend on, or derive from, her being morally responsible for any action other than A.)12 Further, those working on these

10 The last two of these positions are similar in many ways, but can come apart in certain cases. For example, Pereboom (2001) is a hard incompatibilist but not an impossibilist: he holds that persons whose actions were brought about via a suitable indeterministic agent-causal process could have free will, but that we are not such persons, and are therefore unfree even if indeterminism is true. (Agent-causation is, roughly, the view that free actions must be caused by the agent as a substance; it is commonly contrasted with event-causal views that describe the etiology of action in terms of agent-involving events. This distinction is complex, but fortunately need not be explicated further here, since it does not play a significant role in later discussion. For a detailed and helpful critical analysis of agent- and event-causal libertarian accounts, see especially Clarke (2003).) 11 See section 3.1 for further discussion of these issues. 12 The restriction to ‘direct’ moral responsibility here is necessary to account for certain special types of cases in which agents are plausibly taken to be morally responsible for things that they did not do freely. For example, a drunk driver who hits a pedestrian may be blameworthy for doing so, even if the drunk driver did not freely hit the pedestrian. In the literature, these cases are commonly handled by ‘tracing principles’ that ground an agent’s moral responsibility for an unfree action in moral responsibility for some earlier action that was performed freely, and that led to the later unfree action – in this case, the driver’s (unimpaired, and presumably free) decision to start drinking. Actions for which an agent is directly morally responsible are, then, those actions for which the agent’s moral responsibility does not result from a tracing principle of this type. I say that S is directly morally responsible for A ‘to the extent that’ she meets the criteria specified above in order to allow for the possibility that “an agent’s degree 6

issues generally adopt positions on the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility that mirror their views on the relationship between the former and free agency.13 Unfortunately, the contemporary literature exhibits extensive disagreement with respect to how ‘moral responsibility’ should be characterized; consequently, I will not attempt to formulate a precise definition of this term here. Virtually everyone will agree on at least this much: if an agent is appropriately held to be blame- or praiseworthy with respect to an action, then that agent is morally responsible – in some sense of ‘morally responsible’ – for that action. As discussion of moral responsibility in the following chapters generally concerns instances in which people do in fact hold (sometimes hypothetical) agents to be blame- or praiseworthy for various actions, and presumably take themselves to be doing so appropriately, this broad characterization should be adequate enough for my purposes here. Just as most contemporary theorists adopt positions on the (in)compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism that accord with their views on the (in)compatibility of the latter and free will, so research shows that pretheoretic intuitions typically, although not universally, follow a similar pattern. That is, most people who judge that a deterministic agent is morally responsible for an action are also willing to say that she performed that action freely, and vice versa; the same claim holds, mutatis mutandis, for those who deny these claims.14,15 Because of this, I think that most of the conclusions drawn in later chapters hold for both notions, and therefore often make claims about both free will and moral responsibility (and use phrases like ‘free and responsible agency’) in the course of this discussion. While there are exceptions, it seems that from both pre- and post-theoretic standpoints it is usually the case that determinism is

of direct moral responsibility for an action may involve a mixture of inherited and direct moral responsibility” (Mele 2006, 102n4). 13 A notable exception here may be Fischer (see especially Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2007a), who endorses what he calls ‘semicompatibilism’; on this view, “causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, quite apart from whether causal determinism rules out the sort of freedom that involves access to alternative possibilities” (Fischer 2007a, 56). Yet, even Fischer acknowledges that a type of control not involving such access – one he calls ‘guidance control’ – is compatible with determinism. Insofar as guidance control can be interpreted as a variety of freedom, Fischer’s account implies that this variety tracks moral responsibility with respect to the compatibility question. 14 Again, this claim should be interpreted so as to exclude cases in which an agent’s moral responsibility for an action is arrived at by way of a tracing-type principle. 15 See sections 3.1 and, especially, 3.3 for further discussion of this issue. It also bears noting that my claim that most people who judge that an agent performed an action freely are also willing to hold this agent morally responsible for that action assumes that the action in question is morally valenced – i.e., is either morally good or morally bad. I take no stand here on whether agents can be morally responsible for actions that are morally neutral (e.g. tying one’s shoes, when there is no special significance attached to this action), either as a matter of pretheoretic thought or otherwise. 7

characterized as compatible with moral responsibility just in case the former is also characterized as compatible with free will.16 Thus far, I have emphasized several areas in which the treatment provided here will accord with generally accepted terminology and distinctions relevant to the free will debate. In the next section, I consider a few crucial points where this treatment will depart from that traditional framework.

1.2 Descriptive and Prescriptive Questions

Recall that the compatibility question asks whether free will is compatible with (causal) determinism. This way of framing the question is, in my view, in need of refinement. To see why, note first that answering it requires identifying the referent of the term ‘free will’ (or, at least, identifying certain properties of this referent). Simply put, it is impossible to answer a question concerning the compatibility of free will and determinism without having some idea of what free will is, and doing that requires having some idea of what is picked out by the term ‘free will’ as employed in the question at hand. So, how exactly is this term employed in the compatibility question? In other words, what usage of ‘free will’ is at issue? One natural way to answer these last questions is to take, as a starting point, the usage of the term ‘free will’ as employed in everyday language. That is, one might investigate the actual usage of ‘free will’ and related terminology – e.g. certain uses of terms like ‘free’ and ‘freely’ – in an attempt to determine the properties of whatever it is that these terms identify, and then work on figuring out whether or not those properties are compatible with the truth of determinism (i.e. whether it could ever be true to say of something in a deterministic world that it has those properties).17 On this way of understanding the problem, the referent of ‘free will’ is

16 In the pretheoretic case, this last claim should be interpreted somewhat loosely. In particular, most people approaching these issues pretheoretically have no specific commitments with respect to determinism, since they’re not familiar with the technical definition of this thesis provided above. They may, however, form judgments or act in ways that imply certain facts about determinism in this technical sense; these types of judgments or actions are what I have in mind in saying that from their standpoint determinism may be ‘characterized as’ (in)compatible with free will and moral responsibility. 17 Incidentally, I take it that a similar investigation is not required for ‘determinism’ because this term already has an antecedently stipulated technical definition (which was set out above). One could, if one wished, undertake such an investigation, but that is not the project pursued here. Rather, I want to examine whether whatever is picked out by ‘free will’ is compatible with the thesis of determinism as specified earlier; those who wish to pursue other projects may feel ‘free’ to do so. 8

settled prior to philosophical theorizing, and is determined by pretheoretic usage of the terminology associated with this notion. ‘Pretheoretic’ usage, as I employ the term here, refers to the usage of terminology related to free will by those who have received no special training in the issues associated with this topic. In what follows, I also use the term ‘folk’ in a manner synonymous with ‘pretheoretic’ – e.g. ‘folk intuitions,’ ‘folk judgments,’ etc.18 I say that this is one way to go about determining what ‘free will’ picks out, but not that it is the only way. Some researchers might prefer to investigate the properties of whatever it is that their own individual usage of this term identifies, or they might instead research the contours of some notion corresponding to the usage given this term by a group of philosophical colleagues, or by theorists in other disciplines. They might even stipulatively define ‘free will’ and address the question of whether ‘free will’ as so stipulated is compatible with determinism. For now, I take no issue with any such approach. Rather, I wish only to note that theorizing about free will has to start somewhere, and I for one am at a loss as to where that would be if it isn’t at somebody’s notion of ‘free will.’ Call this notion – however one chooses to identify it – ‘free will*.’ Now suppose that one has correctly identified the contours of free will*, and determined whether it is or is not compatible with determinism. What next? Well, maybe nothing – one might simply pack up one’s office and retire from philosophy. On the other hand, one might wonder whether this fact about free will* has any implications for pretheoretic usage of ‘free will.’ Maybe people should be using ‘free will’ differently – that is, maybe they should be using this term to pick out free will*, instead of whatever it is that they actually pick out when they talk about free will. One may be especially inclined to pursue this route if one thinks free will* is free will (full stop). That is, theorists who think they have identified what free will really is may want pretheoretic usage of ‘free will’ to conform to the facts about this notion. (After all, on this type of view people who don’t pick out free will* with ‘free will’ aren’t talking about free will. Presumably this terminological error should be corrected.)

18 This terminology will be familiar to those acquainted with work in ‘experimental philosophy,’ as it follows conventions adopted in much of that work. (I comment briefly on experimental philosophy at the end of this section.) I want to emphasize here that this usage of ‘folk’ is not intended to be in any way derogatory; rather, it is meant only to refer to commonsense views on a topic – the views of ‘ordinary folks.’ As should be clear throughout this dissertation, I take these views very seriously, and think that they have a significant role to play in philosophical theorizing. 9

Of course, it’s possible that people should not be using ‘free will’ differently. For example, if one thinks that the referent of free will* is identical to the referent of ‘free will’ as used pretheoretically, then one might think that there’s nothing wrong with this usage. Either way, though, the question of what people should say about free will makes sense: either what they do say is what they should say, or it isn’t. This last point, in my view, brings out two importantly distinct ways in which one might formulate the compatibility question. First, one might interpret it as a descriptive question, as follows:

What do people in fact think about whether or not free will is compatible with determinism?

Second, one might distinguish a normative – or what I here call ‘prescriptive’19 – version of the compatibility question along the following lines:

All things considered, what should people think about whether or not free will is compatible with determinism?

No doubt there are also other ways in which the compatibility question might be refined to bring additional issues to the fore, and research into these additional issues may lead to any number of interesting and worthwhile projects. I take it, though, that the descriptive and prescriptive questions just formulated are among those warranting further investigation. As the descriptive question in particular is the subject of extensive discussion in what follows, I briefly outline here some of my reasons for considering this question in greater detail. In this regard, it seems to me that discerning the nature of the most adequate response to the descriptive question is likely to help shed some light on that of its prescriptive counterpart. This is because responding to the latter requires clarifying what roles free will should play in underwriting various linguistic and social practices, and theorists are more likely to make an informed judgment about what these roles should be to the extent that it is clear what these roles

19 The ‘prescriptive’ label employed above is borrowed from Vargas (2005; 2007a), as is the distinction currently being drawn between descriptive and prescriptive theorizing. (Vargas, though, uses the term ‘diagnostic’ where I prefer ‘descriptive.’) 10

currently are. For example, if a pretheoretic notion of free will that is predominantly incompatibilist underwrites some especially important social practices, and if it is determined that a compatibilist notion cannot underwrite those same practices, that is reason to think that people should not adopt a compatibilist notion of free will with respect to those practices. Thus, addressing the descriptive question may prove beneficial for future prescriptive work. Moreover, the descriptive question is, in my view at least, of considerable theoretical interest in its own right, for at least two reasons. First, I argue in the next chapter that (post- theoretic) philosophical accounts of free will are commonly rooted – sometimes rather deeply – in what their authors take to be the predominant ‘commonsense’ view of this notion. Particularly since these authors often reach conflicting diagnoses of pretheoretic thought, with some claiming that such thought is largely compatibilist and others maintaining that it is predominantly incompatibilist, it would be of theoretical interest to discover who is right and who is wrong. Doing so involves investigating the descriptive question. Second, even theorists lacking any commitments on the nature of pretheoretic notions of free will may learn something about their view by considering these notions in greater detail. At the very least, these theorists should be curious about whether the theoretical commitments they do have are shared by the general public. If they aren’t shared by the public in this way, then maybe they should be: again, if one thinks that one has identified what free will really is, then maybe people should think about free will in a way that corresponds with the facts about this notion. This, then, is another sense in which descriptive issues are relevant to philosophical theorizing about free will. For these reasons, ensuing chapters are devoted primarily to investigating the descriptive compatibility question. In doing so, I aim to develop and defend a particular response to this question – that is, an account of the content of pretheoretic thought bearing on the relationship between free will and causal determinism. My discussion therefore adopts a focus on empirical issues that has, until recently, been largely absent from philosophical treatments of topics relevant to free will. This focus has, though, become more prominent in recent years: the increasing popularity of so-called ‘experimental philosophy,’ in which “philosophers proceed by conducting experimental investigations of the psychological processes underlying people’s intuitions about central philosophical issues” (Knobe and Nichols 2008, 3), has brought with it greater interest in empirical data and the consequences of these data for philosophical theorizing. However, the movement has its detractors; not all theorists are convinced of the relevance of

11

empirical work in general, and work in experimental philosophy in particular, to theoretical discussion of free will.20 Now, a comprehensive treatment of the debate over experimental philosophy is outside the scope of this dissertation. Nonetheless, since the present work is largely sympathetic to this field, and includes extensive examination of work arising from it, a few brief comments on the issue are in order. In this regard, note first that while I do spill quite a bit of ink discussing the experimental work of philosophers in what follows, I do not myself conduct any such work for this dissertation.21 Because of that, this project does not constitute a work of experimental philosophy so much as one about it – or, more clearly, about its results. (This is not to say that these results are the only ones considered in the following pages, since work in other disciplines is also addressed.) As I conceive of this project, it consists primarily in philosophical analysis of empirical work; this analysis itself proceeds in a more or less traditional manner, whatever one thinks of its subject matter. So understood, the treatment provided here does not appear to be methodologically different, in any relevant way, from those of other philosophers who seek to address empirical issues. For example, Mele (2009) develops philosophical critiques of empirical conclusions drawn by, among others, the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet (1999) and the psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002), and Bishop and Trout (2005) pursue an epistemological account informed by empirical work in psychology. Similarly, in the following chapters I aim to conduct a philosophical investigation of empirical work, and in that way aspire to approach this work – some, but not all, of which was conducted by philosophers – from an analytic perspective. Still, skeptics about experimental philosophy may question the relevance of pretheoretic thought about free will to theoretical work on this topic. Why, they may think, should philosophers care about the content of commonsense notions of free will? In response to this question, I must admit that I have little to say other than what I have already said above, although I hasten to add that in my view what was said above has merit. In particular, empirical facts can impact philosophical theorizing about free will by bearing on what we – either philosophers or people in general – should say about this topic. Those who think that the philosophy of free will

20 For some worries about experimental philosophy, see Kauppinen (2007) and Sosa (2007). For defenses of it, see Knobe and Nichols (2008) and Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007). 21 I do, however, briefly consider some such work originally published for a different purpose; see Miller and Feltz (2011), which is discussed in section 3.1 below. 12

is partly constrained by commonsense thought on the topic will find this obvious. Even those who deny this, and hold instead that the philosophy of free will is not constrained by pretheoretic views, should acknowledge that philosophy may be relevant to what other people should say about free will, if only because what they should say is what is in fact true. Consequently, the content of pretheoretic thought about free will is also relevant to the views of these philosophers, at least insofar as this content must be known in order to identify which aspects of it fail to accord with the facts about this notion. Finally, I remain convinced that the issues addressed here are interesting in their own right. Having studied free will for several years now, I began investigating the descriptive question because I was, frankly, curious to know what people who don’t study the issue think about it. My suspicion – or, at least, my sincere hope – is that I’m not the only one who feels that way about these issues.

1.3 Coming Attractions

The succeeding chapters address the foregoing concerns, and their implications, in significantly greater detail. Discussion there proceeds as follows. In Chapter Two, I seek primarily to provide a more extensive discussion of the descriptive compatibility question that resolves some issues left unaddressed by the initial characterization of this question provided above. I begin by developing a more refined version of the descriptive question itself, and in the course of doing so adopt a few additional terminological conventions. I then survey the range of positions constituting prima facie plausible responses to the descriptive question – including descriptive variantism, along with descriptive versions of both compatibilism and incompatibilism – and clarify the burdens of proof incumbent on proponents of each of these positions. The latter is achieved primarily by adjudicating a debate between Manuel Vargas (2007a; 2007b; 2009) and Michael McKenna (2009) on closely related issues. I also survey some recent work on free agency with the aim of situating it within the descriptive framework developed here, and argue that much of this work is (sometimes implicitly) committed to either descriptive compatibilism or descriptive incompatibilism.

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Chapter Three conducts an initial survey of the merits and drawbacks of each of the descriptive accounts outlined Chapter Two. There, I consider the implications of extant empirical data (where this data derives primarily from experimental results in philosophy, psychology, and – to a lesser extent – neuroscience) for these views, and conclude that these data at least initially favor descriptive variantism as the most adequate response to the descriptive compatibility question. In particular, I argue – as noted above – that pretheoretic intuitions elicited in concrete (or, relatedly, high-affect) contexts tend to imply compatibilist-friendly commitments, while judgments formed in abstract (or, relatedly, low-affect) circumstances are often conducive to incompatibilism.22 However, I also acknowledge that this conclusion would be considerably weakened if it turned out that some sufficiently broad range of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question were mistaken, in the sense that these intuitions result from performance errors.23 I therefore characterize the primary conclusion of this chapter as a conditional claim: if pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question, as elicited in empirical work on this issue, are by and large genuine (in the sense that they do not result from performance errors), then descriptive variantism constitutes the best response to the descriptive version of this question. Later chapters are devoted primarily to defending my view that the balance of presently available evidence supports the truth of this conditional’s antecedent. If this is correct, then given that the conditional itself is true, its consequent is also plausible. Because there is, as far as I am aware, no completely unproblematic or generally accepted method of distinguishing intuitions caused by performance errors from those not so caused, I adopt an alternative route to my preferred conclusion that proceeds in several stages. First, I argue against what I take to be the most convincing extant account that treats compatibilist intuitions as often resulting from performance errors. Second, I argue against what I take to be the most convincing extant account that treats incompatibilist intuitions as often resulting from performance errors. Third, I briefly highlight some reasons to think that other ‘performance error accounts’ will likely also fail to successfully challenge descriptive variantism.

22 As I explain in later chapters, abstraction and affect appear to be closely connected. Specifically, increasing affect seems to be one method of increasing concreteness – so affect is inversely related to abstraction. On this issue, see especially Weigel (2011). 23 The nature of a ‘performance error,’ as I understand it, is briefly clarified in Chapter Two. 14

In accordance with this argumentative structure, Chapter Four begins by briefly elucidating the natures of both abstraction and affect. I then turn to consider an ‘affective performance error account,’ suggested by Nichols and Knobe (2007), that treats emotional reactions as a potential source of bias for intuitions relevant to the descriptive compatibility question. Since emotional reactions primarily occur in concrete contexts, and these contexts typically engender higher rates of compatibilist-friendly judgments, the account at issue primarily targets intuitions associated with compatibilism as subject to error. In response, I note several considerations suggesting that Nichols and Knobe’s theory fails to undermine my claim that descriptive variantism represents the most adequate account of pretheoretic commitments relevant to the compatibility question. Perhaps most prominent among these considerations are my claims that, first, this theory does not impugn the numerous pretheoretic judgments favoring compatibilism that have been elicited in low-affect contexts, and, second, the account leaves it unclear why affect should be thought to be generally favorable to performance errors in the first place. Chapter Five pursues an analogous project with respect to the ‘bypassing hypothesis’ recently developed by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues (Nahmias 2006; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias 2011; Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012). On their view, incompatibilist-friendly intuitions, which typically occur in abstract contexts, are commonly subject to error; in particular, these intuitions often result from the mistaken impression that certain key aspects of agency are ‘bypassed’ in deterministic worlds. (To say that these agential features are ‘bypassed,’ as Nahmias and his co-authors employ this term, is to say roughly that they play no causal role in action production.) The chapter focuses on the most recent defenses of the bypassing hypothesis, which are developed by Nahmias and Dylan Murray (Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012). As with my discussion of Nichols and Knobe’s account in Chapter Four, I contend in this chapter that Nahmias and Murray’s arguments do not constitute successful challenges to descriptive variantism. Here, the primary considerations adduced to support this contention are, first, that intuitions that appear to favor bypassing may not actually do so and, second, that these intuitions may not be causally related to judgments about free will in any way that would undermine the latter. Chapter Six serves both to offer some concluding remarks in defense of descriptive variantism and to briefly draw out some of the implications of this thesis for future research.

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Regarding the former, I raise several issues suggesting that performance error hypotheses other than those considered in previous chapters are, in general, unlikely to falsify descriptive variantism. In some cases, these issues are related to those noted earlier in critiquing the affective performance error and bypassing accounts. As to the implications of descriptive variantism for future work, I tentatively suggest that the plausibility of this thesis renders revisionism about free will in general, and revisionism toward compatibilism in particular, strong contenders in the free will debate. A view is ‘revisionist,’ in the usage of this term employed here, if it advocates a response to the prescriptive compatibility question that differs from its response to the descriptive version of this question.24 Here, my differences with Wittgenstein become more apparent: while we agree that one important philosophical project is primarily descriptive, I am not convinced that philosophy ‘may in no way interfere’ with issues arising outside the descriptive arena. My suggestion that revisionism warrants consideration in light of descriptive variantism is, however, tempered by caution. This is particularly the case insofar as I acknowledge that a complete accounting of the prospects for revisionist theories, including especially more detailed assessments of the extent to which revision is desirable or even psychologically possible, will have to await future work. While I here aspire to provide ‘a clear view…of the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved,’ the question of how, if at all, to resolve this contradiction must, at least for now, remain unsettled.

24 The primary proponent of such an account in the literature is Manuel Vargas; see especially Vargas (2004; 2005; 2007a; 2011; 2013). While Vargas’s characterization of ‘revisionist’ accounts differs from the one just offered, his own theory qualifies as revisionist on both his characterization and my own. For additional brief discussion of this point, see section 6.2. 16

CHAPTER TWO:

REFRAMING THE QUESTION

In the previous chapter, I distinguished between descriptive and prescriptive versions of Kane’s (1996) ‘compatibility question.’1 One immediate consequence of this distinction is a blurring of the traditional boundaries between compatibilism and incompatibilism. This results primarily from the fact that theories of free agency respecting the divide between descriptive and prescriptive theorizing must provide, not one, but two accounts of the relationship between free will and determinism. These accounts can come apart in a variety of ways; for example, one might be a descriptive compatibilist and a prescriptive incompatibilist, or vice versa. Another problem, of particular importance for present purposes, is the possibility that an adequate response to one of these questions may turn out to be neither straightforwardly compatibilist nor straightforwardly incompatibilist – a possibility which, as I argue in succeeding chapters, is likely to obtain. In light of these complexities, it should prove helpful to survey the range of positions available to theorists on this conception of the debate, and situate some extant philosophical work on free agency within the contours of this range. This, with respect to the descriptive question in particular, is the goal of the present chapter. It will emerge from this discussion that, in addition to compatibilist and incompatibilist responses to the descriptive question, a third position – one I call, adapting terminology from Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk (2007),2 descriptive variantism – represents a viable characterization of descriptive commitments. This is so, I argue, despite the fact that the vast majority of contemporary accounts of free agency tend to assume a descriptively invariantist approach with unilateral commitments to one of the two traditional positions on the relationship between free will and determinism. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first of these seeks to clarify the nature of the descriptive question itself, in order to shed some light on what would count as an acceptable

1 Recall that the descriptive question asks, roughly, what most people do in fact think about the compatibility of free will and determinism, while the prescriptive question concerns what they ought to think about this issue. 2 Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk (2007) and Knobe and Doris (2010) use the ‘variantism’ label to describe a position on moral responsibility that is in many ways similar to the view of free agency under discussion here. One crucial difference, however, is that these authors defend variantism as both a descriptive and prescriptive position, whereas a descriptive variantist as described here need not have any particular prescriptive commitments. 17

response to this question. Sections two and three evaluate the burdens of proof incumbent on compatibilists and incompatibilists in the descriptive arena; they do this by way of adjudicating a debate between Manuel Vargas (2007a; 2007b; 2009) and Michael McKenna (2009) on just this issue. Section two summarizes this debate and raises some concerns for each author’s position, while section three defends a position on burdens of proof that derives partly from the views of both authors while completely vindicating neither. Additionally, the latter section employs this characterization of dialectical commitments to develop more explicit versions of descriptive compatibilism, incompatibilism, and variantism. Section four applies this picture of the debate to prominent recent work on free agency, suggesting that descriptive variantism has been largely ignored as a potential response to the descriptive question. Instead, descriptive and prescriptive theorizing are often conflated, resulting in implicitly invariantist descriptive commitments.

2.1 Refining the Descriptive Question

The formulation of the descriptive question provided in the previous chapter read as follows: “what do people in fact think about whether or not free will is compatible with determinism?” Here, I want to clarify several aspects of this question; addressing these issues should help expedite later discussion. I have already suggested that the ‘people’ at issue with respect to this question are those whose usage of ‘free will’ and related terminology is pretheoretic – that is, those individuals who employ this terminology in everyday contexts, but who have received no special training in the issues associated with free will.3 I will not defend this interpretation again here; I do, though, wish to emphasize that insofar as philosophical theorizing on free will is intended to provide an analysis of this notion as it is customarily understood, some appeal to the broader social context surrounding free agency is required. In particular, we need to investigate the circumstances with respect to which ordinary language users make, or withhold, judgments of free will and moral responsibility. These judgments play a central role in anchoring a significant proportion of philosophical theory; as Mele notes, a philosophical account that ignores “common-sense judgments” about the applicability of its central notions “runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter” (2001, 27).

3 See section 1.2. 18

This discussion of the descriptive question will therefore address the content of ‘folk’ thought on the compatibility issue; examining what sort of ‘thought’ is relevant here yields further precision. As a first pass, note that standard practice in both philosophy and psychology involves investigating pretheoretic thought on topics of concern by gathering data on intuitions concerning these topics.4 Unfortunately, a widely accepted analysis of what intuitions come to has yet to be provided, and I have no wish to attempt such an analysis here. I thus often use ‘intuition’ and its cognates as a sort of catch-all term to describe folk reactions to various questions or scenarios. I can, however, say by way of clarification that I take such reactions to generally consist in judgments resulting in beliefs (e.g., about whether an agent in a scenario is blameworthy or not). In some cases, as when I generalize from certain data to conclusions about the ‘intuitions’ of the folk at large, I also include dispositions and inclinations to have such beliefs. Typically, the beliefs in question are generated via more or less immediate responses to consideration of a question or scenario; they may also be non-inferential in the sense that they are not arrived at by a process of reasoning from earlier-held beliefs.5 As I am primarily concerned here with the judgments (or dispositions to judge, or inclinations to judge) and resulting beliefs (or dispositions/inclinations to believe) themselves, and not with the process by which they are generated, I take it that a more precise characterization of intuitions is unnecessary for present purposes.6 A further issue concerning the types of thought relevant to the descriptive question turns on the nature of conceptual content. It is often suggested that research on folk intuitions reveals information about the ‘folk concept’ of the topic associated with those intuitions (e.g., Malle and Knobe (1997); Knobe (2008); Feltz and Cokely (2009)). Doubtless this is indeed true in many cases, but it is not a result I want to claim for the present investigation. This is largely because the nature of concepts is highly contentious; philosophers and psychologists sometimes appear to be using the term ‘concept’ to discuss different phenomena (Machery 2009), and within each of

4 In psychology, this data collection generally consists in conducting surveys and other experiments; in philosophy, it has until recently been largely a matter of conceptual analysis. 5 Cf. Sinnott-Armstrong, who notes that “by intuitions, I mean inclinations to believe claims whose attractiveness does not depend on any conscious inference” (2008, 212, emphasis in original), and Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, and Cushman, who hold that “when we refer to moral intuitions, we mean strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs” (2010, 246, emphasis in original). 6 For a survey of accounts of intuitions in the philosophical literature, see Cappelen (2012, 1–24). As Cappelen notes, not all philosophers take intuitions to be beliefs (although many do). However, not much hangs on this point for the current discussion. 19

these disciplines there are multiple theories of the nature of concepts.7 In many cases, whether the content of a belief is conceptual or non-conceptual will depend on which of these theories one endorses. Because I have no wish to restrict the applicability of my conclusions in this way, and because I frankly see no reason to think that non-conceptual content is, in and of itself, irrelevant in characterizing the folk understanding of any given phenomenon, I have thus far endeavored to avoid concept talk as much as possible, and will continue to do so in what follows. Instead, I use ‘notion’ as a non-technical substitute to discuss the subject of folk intuitions. In this way, I hope to remain neutral among competing accounts of concepts; advocates of such accounts may feel free to apply their preferred theory to my conclusions as they wish. This is not to say, of course, that any and every pretheoretic belief concerning the compatibility issue is relevant to present concerns. What are of interest are those beliefs that plausibly result from the competence(s) underlying ordinary judgments about free agency, as opposed to the performance systems that (more or less) directly result in these judgments. Unfortunately, it is difficult to give a fully explicit analysis of competences; roughly, though, a competence corresponds to a psychological mechanism that underwrites an ability to do a certain task, whereas a performance system corresponds to the mechanism that actually implements this ability in particular cases.8 What is important for this discussion is not so much the distinction itself as the recognition that free agency judgments may be affected by performance system errors; when this happens, the judgment in question is not plausibly taken as reflecting the competence underlying these judgments. For example, motor planning is a paradigmatic example of a competence that most of us possess (Machery 2009, 8), but the performance systems that implement this competence can go astray in various ways, resulting in error – as when I drop my coffee cup while going for a refill. Chomsky draws a similar distinction between linguistic competence and performance, noting that competence – unlike performance – is “unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention…and errors (random or characteristic)” (1965, 3). Similarly, the competence underlying free agency judgments is not impugned by mistakes in implementation; beliefs

7 For an overview of psychological theories of concepts, see Machery (2009) and Prinz (2002). On philosophical theories, see Machery (2009), Peacocke (2009), and Bermudez (2009). 8 For additional remarks on the nature of this distinction, see Knobe and Doris (2010, 347–9) and Machery (2009, 8– 9, 121–5). 20

resulting from such “performance errors” may be ignored in developing a response to the descriptive question.9 Two further points about competences warrant brief consideration. First, the relationship between competences and concepts need not be one-to-one; as Knobe and Doris note, competences “should be regarded as independent of the various philosophical debates surrounding concepts, conceptual analysis, analyticity, and so forth” (2010, 347). The distinction drawn here between competences and performance systems thus does not impugn my professed neutrality regarding theories of conceptual content. Second, and again following Knobe and Doris, “it is important not to confuse the distinction between competence and performance (a psychological distinction) with the distinction between getting the right answer and getting the wrong answer (a normative distinction)” (2010, 348–9). Judgments reflecting the competence(s) underlying free agency need not be those that we would, after philosophical reflection, endorse; indeed, they need not even be consistent. It is entirely possible that one’s competences incline one to judge that an agent acted freely when this action is presented under one description, and incline one to the opposite judgment when the action is presented under a different description. That is, these competences may be operating correctly even when they do not deliver (what, on reflection, we would endorse as) the correct response. Notably, this may be so even if the folk themselves can be brought to maintain that they have made a mistake. Suppose, for example, that moral considerations play a role in whether agents are judged to have caused a particular outcome.10 Even if many folk, when informed about this fact, are inclined to treat such judgments as errors, this alone does not show that they are such; it may yet be the case that the competence underlying causal judgments utilizes moral considerations as inputs. While folk judgments concerning systematic errors may constitute evidence for what, as a prescriptive matter, we should say about something, these judgments may not bear on what we do say about it, as a matter of description. Keeping these points in mind, we can now formulate a more precise version of the descriptive question. Call intuitions (and beliefs, judgments, etc.) that reflect the folk

9 In later chapters, I consider some defenses of the view that large swaths of folk judgments about free agency result from precisely this sort of error. 10 The example is from Knobe and Doris (2010, 348). As they note, there is some evidence that this is in fact the case (Alicke 1992; Alicke 2000; Knobe and Fraser 2008). 21

competence(s) relevant to free will and moral responsibility ‘genuine’ intuitions (and beliefs, judgments, etc.). (Again, I occasionally include dispositions or inclinations to arrive at these states within this rubric.) Then the formulation of the descriptive question that I will be addressing is the following:

[D] What is the content of genuine pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the question of whether or not free will is compatible with determinism?

I now turn to consider some issues surrounding the various hypotheses that might be proposed in response to this question.

2.2 Descriptive Hypotheses: A Debate

Clearly, compatibilism and incompatibilism – or, more precisely, descriptive versions of these positions – represent two potential responses to D as presently framed. One must be careful, however, to characterize these responses in ways that do justice to the complexity of the data to which they pertain. Defining ‘descriptive compatibilism’ as the view that the content of genuine pretheoretic beliefs ‘implies compatibilism,’ and mutatis mutandis for ‘descriptive incompatibilism,’ will not suffice here. Suppose we find that all of the relevant pretheoretic intuitions favor incompatibilism, so descriptive incompatibilism is true. Now imagine we find a single individual who, once in her life – and never again afterwards – responded to a deterministically described thought experiment with the intuition that the agent depicted was free and responsible. (Imagine further that this intuition is genuine, in that it reflects her underlying competence with respect to such judgments, etc.) It seems unlikely that we would declare descriptive incompatibilism false on this basis. The same case, of course, can be made for descriptive compatibilism. We therefore face a problem: exactly what proportion of pretheoretic intuitions have to fall a certain way in order to entail a particular descriptive position? Consideration of a related debate between Manuel Vargas and Michael McKenna helps to bring out the significance of this point. In several places Vargas has defended a position that he calls “folk conceptual incompatibilism,” according to which “for a great many of us, there are contexts in which incompatibilist convictions are really, truly, genuinely part of the conceptual

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furniture with which we find ourselves” (2013, 5; see also Vargas 2006; Vargas 2007a). Vargas supports this view in part by appealing to experiments in which a majority of folk have responded to survey prompts in ways that purportedly imply incompatibilism.11 As he acknowledges, however, this is not the whole story: other studies have elicited predominantly compatibilist judgments.12 In response to these apparently conflicting experimental results, Vargas suggests that “we might conclude that our ordinary concepts of free will and moral responsibility are not unified. Perhaps we inconsistently deploy different concepts of freedom and responsibility” (2007a, 137). This state of affairs, he contends, nonetheless favors incompatibilism:

Incompatibilists need not – indeed, generally do not – deny that there are conditions under which we utilize compatibilist notions of freedom. What incompatibilists about the folk concept must hold is that our ascriptions of free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism being true in some important sense. For compatibilism to be a meaningful position in this context, it must hold that there is no important sense in which our ascriptions of free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with the thesis of determinism. (Vargas 2007a, 137, emphasis in original)

Conflicting experimental data thus represents, according to Vargas, “something of a victory for incompatibilist diagnoses of commonsense” (2007a, 138). McKenna, however, suggests in response to this characterization that Vargas’s portrayal “cannot be the proper reply” to concerns regarding conflicts in folk notions of free agency (2009, 11). He continues:

It is not the compatibilists’ burden to knock down every sense of freedom and responsibility found in our ordinary concept. There are likely ludicrous strands of thought bound up in our ordinary concept of moral responsibility…All that matters is that there is an important sense – and note everything rides here on

11 Vargas mainly cites Nichols and Knobe (2007) here; I discuss this work in more detail in succeeding chapters. 12 Vargas cites Nahmias et al. (2008), Nichols (2006), Nichols and Knobe (2007), and Woolfolk et al. (2006) in this regard; much of this work is also considered in greater detail in the next chapter. 23

what we mean by ‘important’ – that is part of our ordinary folk way of thinking, captures all that is worth wanting in a theory of moral responsibility, and is compatible with determinism. (2009, 11, emphasis in original)

In responding to McKenna, Vargas doubles down on his incompatibilist construal of pretheoretic thought, reemphasizing that “even if there are conditions under which we really are compatibilists, the compatibilist will have hardly secured what he or she endeavors to secure if there are also a substantial number of conditions under which we are manifestly not compatibilists” (2009, 49). What is needed here is a way of situating burdens of proof regarding D that respects both compatibilist and incompatibilist presumptions; unfortunately, while each author’s suggestion in this regard has some merit, neither seems entirely successful. McKenna, for his part, is surely right to note that compatibilists need not defend their view against every ‘ludicrous’ pretheoretic incompatibilist notion of free agency. It does not follow from this, however, that ‘all that matters’ is whether some pretheoretic notion or other is compatibilist. If a majority – or even a significant minority – of folk judge, in response to consideration of deterministically described scenarios, that agents in these scenarios are not free or responsible, this is not ‘ludicrous’; it is, rather, evidence for a straightforwardly incompatibilist aspect of folk thought, and something with which the compatibilist should be expected to contend. Vargas’s portrayal, in contrast, appears to set the bar too low for descriptive incompatibilists. For one, his characterization may fail to capture the burden of proof incumbent on these theorists by their own lights. Suppose we become convinced that, while there is indeed ‘one important sense’ in which folk notions of free agency are incompatibilist, there are three dozen other ‘important senses’ in which these notions are not threatened by determinism. I find it unlikely that descriptive incompatibilists would take this to vindicate their position, as Vargas’s account implies. Moreover, it seems questionable to argue that compatibilists must defend their position against the possibility of mixed experimental results while denying that incompatibilists have any such commitment. If descriptive compatibilism must hold that ‘there is no important sense’ in which pretheoretic thought is incompatibilist, as Vargas claims, shouldn’t the incompatibilist position be that there is no important sense in which pretheoretic thought is compatibilist, as McKenna implies?

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Vargas defends his position against this objection by noting that incompatibilists typically concede the existence of compatibilist varieties of free agency, and thus that the presence of such varieties within the contours of pretheoretic thought does not impugn incompatibilism. But this claim, while historically accurate, doesn’t seem to underwrite the burdens of proof that he proposes. True, incompatibilists often allow that some notions of free agency do not conflict with determinism. But it is not as though the incompatibilist thinks that the kind of free agency that would be threatened if determinism is true is just one among a host of equally important options, or that the compatibilist varieties of free agency that she acknowledges are ‘just as good as’ the incompatibilist notion that she is concerned to explicate. Rather, free agency in the incompatibilist’s preferred sense is supposed to be special, insofar as it alone can secure certain things of great value to us; compatibilist notions of free agency, on this view, are but poor substitutes for the real thing. Consequently, these theorists cannot merely hope for some sense or other in which pretheoretic thought is predominantly incompatibilist. Suppose there is some such sense, but it underwrites nothing of great value, or parallels a predominantly compatibilist notion that does all the same work. Would we conclude, without further debate, that incompatibilism is vindicated? I doubt it.

2.3 Burdens of Proof

The right way to understand the commitments of compatibilism and incompatibilism as descriptive accounts lies, I think, somewhere in between Vargas’s position and McKenna’s. To see this, focus on the sense of free agency at issue in traditional incompatibilist theories – that is, the one that is held by these theories to be undermined if determinism is true.13 Free agency in this sense, as noted above, is held by incompatibilists to be desirable insofar as it is needed to procure something of value to us; most often, this ‘something’ is moral responsibility. Incompatibilist varieties of free agency are commonly held to be necessary either for moral responsibility in a generic sense (McCann 1998, 176; O’Connor 2000, 21), or for some especially central or important variety thereof, including “basic desert” (Pereboom 2001, xx),

13 Strictly speaking, the diversity of extant incompatibilist theories suggests that there may be multiple ‘senses’ of free agency at issue in these accounts. It seems likely, however, that these senses are ultimately trying to capture the same thing, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Here, my restriction of the discussion to consideration of a single sense at issue in incompatibilist theories is made purely for purposes of simplification; it could be dispensed with at the cost of complicating the ensuing account. 25

“ultimate responsibility” (Kane 1996, 35), and even “heaven-and-hell” responsibility (G. Strawson 2003, 218; see also G. Strawson 2010, 2). In many cases it is simply stipulated in these discussions that the sense of free agency at issue is whichever one is required for the preferred variety of responsibility,14 but even incompatibilists who caution against defining free will in terms of moral responsibility have gone on to suggest that the latter is impossible to procure if determinism is true.15 Just as incompatibilists, while conceding the existence of some compatibilist varieties of free agency, do not hold that their preferred incompatibilist variety is merely one among many, so compatibilists do not respond to incompatibilist concessions by agreeing that their theories capture free agency only in some ‘lesser’ sense than that with which incompatibilists are concerned. Rather, compatibilists typically take themselves to be explicating free agency in the very same sense that is at issue in incompatibilist discussions. (If they didn’t, there would be no compatibility debate; we could all just agree that compatibilists and incompatibilists are talking about different things.) In the (rather rare) event that compatibilists accept that there are varieties of free agency that are threatened by determinism, they tend to maintain that these varieties are either incoherent (and so unobtainable even if indeterminism is true) or not “worth wanting” (Dennett 1984).16 Wallace, for example, acknowledges that some “conceptions of freedom” are incompatible with determinism, but holds that “what we want is not freedom of the will per se, but the kind of freedom that makes us persons, or deliberators, or autonomous valuers, or morally accountable agents” – and this kind of freedom, he contends, is not threatened if determinism is true (1994, 2–3). Note Wallace’s interest in freedom that engenders ‘moral accountability’; compatibilists, like incompatibilists, tend to focus on the kinds of free agency

14 See, for example, the discussions by Pereboom and Strawson cited immediately above. 15 I have in mind here especially van Inwagen, an incompatibilist who famously warns “whatever you do, do not define ‘free will’ this way: ‘free will is whatever sort of freedom is required for moral responsibility’,” (2008, 329n2), but who himself maintains that “to deny the existence of free will commits one to denying the existence of moral responsibility. Until a short while ago, most philosophers would have taken this to be obvious” (1983, 19). However, see also Ginet (1990, 93–4n2). 16 Cf. Dennett (2003, 223, emphasis in original): “If you are one of those who think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.” Notice, incidentally, that in suggesting that free will might be “not quite what you probably thought it was,” Dennett is making an empirical statement about his readers’ beliefs concerning free agency, and in this sense is expressing a claim that bears on the descriptive question. This accords with my contention (defended below) that philosophers often have substantial descriptive commitments, even if these commitments are merely implicit. 26

relevant to moral responsibility (McKenna 2008, 353n2; Nelkin 2011, 150–1; Scanlon 1998, 251). It seems, then, that the dominant sense of free agency at issue in contemporary debates is, roughly, the most theoretically powerful one required for moral responsibility. (As I use the phrase here, free agency in sense A is ‘more theoretically powerful’ than free agency in sense B if A helps to explain, underwrite, or justify a broader range of phenomena – including, especially, interpersonal practices related to moral responsibility, e.g., praising and blaming practices – than B explains.) Of course, the term ‘moral responsibility’ is vague, since – as I have just emphasized – there are multiple senses of this notion at play in the literature as well. However, most theorists concerned with these issues take themselves to be discussing types of moral responsibility that play significant roles in our actual responsibility practices; consequently, we may restrict our attention to whatever varieties of responsibility do in fact play these roles. Now, to the extent that theorists distinguish between multiple varieties of responsibility, most take themselves to be concerned generally with the most interpersonally demanding such type – that is, the variety of moral responsibility that, in their view, licenses the broadest or deepest range of responses toward agents that are responsible in the relevant sense.17 Moreover, it is rare for theorists to explicitly endorse the claim that there is a commonsense variety of moral responsibility more demanding than that purportedly captured by their accounts. Admittedly, some philosophers, especially compatibilists, have been known to claim that certain elements of everyday notions of moral responsibility – e.g., for Fischer, an alternative possibilities requirement (2007b, 188), and for McKenna, “excessive retributivist” elements (2009, 10)18 – should be excised from considered philosophical accounts. But these philosophers tend to also contend that this is no great loss; it is held to allow for an account of moral responsibility that, in Fischer’s words, “need not in any way call for revisions in the concept of moral responsibility or our actual responsibility practices” (2007a, 82).19 It thus appears that these philosophers hold that

17 See, for example, the especially demanding varieties of moral responsibility distinguished by Kane, Pereboom, and Galen Strawson above. These notions are ‘more interpersonally demanding,’ in the sense I have in mind here, insofar as satisfying the conditions on them would appear to make an agent appropriately subject either to (a) additional types of responses from others that ‘weaker’ varieties of responsibility would not license or (b) responses from others that are more intense or extreme in degree than those permitted in virtue of ‘lesser’ types of responsibility. Below, I elaborate further on the notion of ‘interpersonally demanding’ at issue here. 18 See also Fischer (2007a, 82). I briefly return to this claim of McKenna’s in section 6.2. 19 Fischer does suggest that his account “departs significantly from traditional views in the conditions it posits for the application of the concept of moral responsibility” (2007a, 82, emphasis in original). The important point here, however, is that he takes this account to capture the ordinary notion of moral responsibility itself. 27

commonsense notions of moral responsibility can be (fully) captured without recourse to the components that they propose eliminating. Consequently, such theorists are typically committed to the claim that their views capture every significant aspect of the pretheoretic notions and practices concerned with moral responsibility, including the most demanding (significant) aspects of these notions and practices. We may thus say that the sort of free agency with which most theorists are concerned is

what I will call ‘free willS’:

Free willS =df free agency in the most theoretically powerful sense necessary for the most interpersonally demanding type of moral responsibility that plays a significant role in actual pretheoretic responsibility practices.20

On this picture, then, what is primarily at issue between compatibilists and incompatibilists is not whether there is some sense of free will or other that is compatible with determinism, but

whether free willS specifically is so compatible. Understanding the free will debate in this way is, I believe, beneficial for several reasons. For one, it makes sense of the claim that compatibilists and incompatibilists are offering competing analyses of the same thing, and not just talking past each other. For another, it helps clarify burdens of proof with respect to descriptive commitments, as I go on to show momentarily. Before doing so, however, three brief clarificatory points are in order. First, the notions of ‘theoretical power’ and ‘interpersonal demands’ at issue with respect to free willS should not be understood as a matter of the stringency, or number of conditions required for satisfaction, of a given variety of free will or moral responsibility. Such an understanding is highly problematic, since the incompatibilist could always derive a more ‘powerful’ or ‘demanding’ account of free will or moral responsibility by simply appending an additional requirement of indeterminism to any given compatibilist theory. A better understanding treats these notions as functions of the work that a particular variety of free will or moral responsibility does in explaining and justifying various phenomena, including especially the inferences, attitudes, and responses characteristic of existing social practices. One notion is

20 Thanks to Al Mele for assistance in developing this formulation of free willS, and for pointing out the possibility of one problematic reading of it. This problematic reading is considered in the next paragraph. 28

more ‘powerful’ or ‘demanding’ than another, in this sense, when it underwrites a broader range of these practices, or perhaps licenses more intense or extreme versions of them (including, potentially, greater degrees of praise and blame, or more severe forms of reward and censure).

In particular, it is crucial to note that the ‘demandingness’ at issue with respect to free willS concerns the demands to which agents become answerable as a result of satisfying certain conditions on moral responsibility, and not ‘demands’ in the sense of the metaphysical constraints implied by these conditions. Similarly, if it turns out (as I later argue it does) that there are at least two pretheoretic notions of free will – one compatibilist and one incompatibilist – and if these notions underwrite, or justify, precisely the same social practices, then they should be treated as equally powerful. It should not be taken to follow that incompatibilist notions are somehow more ‘powerful’ or ‘demanding’ simply in virtue of requiring the falsity of determinism as an additional condition on their satisfaction.21

Second, my claim that the free will debate primarily concerns free willS is meant as a broad generalization, and not as a complete account of the literature. That is, I am not claiming that all philosophical accounts of free will concern free willS. No doubt there are some exceptions: for example, Mele’s “soft libertarianism,” according to which “freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism, but…the falsity of determinism is required for more desirable brands of these things” (1999, 286, emphasis in original; see also Mele 1995; 1996; 2006), might accommodate notions of free will weaker than that distinguished above. However, the complexity of free will debates is such that I doubt whether any generalization can adequately capture the intricacies of every account on offer. I will thus be satisfied if the present depiction captures the majority of these accounts.22

21 The distinction drawn in this paragraph is similar to the difference, noted by Susan Wolf (1990), between “deep responsibility” and the more “superficial” variety of responsibility to which (what she calls) “real self views” are purportedly limited. Cf. also Watson (1996) on the difference between “attributability” and “accountability.” 22 It is an interesting question whether Fischer’s “semicompatibilist” theory is best understood as concerned primarily with free willS. According to Fischer, moral responsibility and the control it requires (Fischer’s ‘guidance control’) are compatible with determinism, but the kind of freedom associated with the ability to do otherwise (‘regulative control’) may not be (Fischer 1994; Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2007a). (See section 1.1.) Moreover, Fischer takes his view to depart from commonsense in that “it identifies guidance control, rather than regulative control, as the relevant sort of freedom” for moral responsibility ascriptions (2007a, 82). Since regulative control, on Fischer’s view, is not required for moral responsibility, it follows that on this view regulative control is not free willS, as I have characterized it here. It thus seems likely that guidance control should in fact be identified with free willS, since, as far as Fischer indicates, it is the most ‘theoretically powerful’ sense of free will required for moral responsibility. If this is right, then Fischer’s account most likely does fall within the contours of the debate over free willS as characterized above; however, not much hangs on this point for present purposes. 29

Finally, those accounts that concern themselves with free willS typically take a clear and inflexible stand on whether it is or is not compatible with determinism. Incompatibilists do not

think that free willS is sometimes satisfied in deterministic worlds, and compatibilists do not

allow that that there is a sense in which free willS and determinism are incompatible. Rather, the former take determinism to be a sufficient condition for the absence of free will in this sense – free willS cannot exist if determinism is true. The latter, for their part, deny that there is any such requirement on free willS; determinism, in and of itself, never undermines this variety of free

will. Free willS, it is maintained, is (in)compatible with determinism full stop. With these points in mind, return to the debate between McKenna and Vargas considered above. Focusing on free willS, it seems to me, brings out the way in which McKenna and Vargas fail to fully capture the burdens of proof inherent in descriptive compatibilism and incompatibilism. While these authors focus on how many varieties (or ‘senses’) of free agency need to fall a certain way to vindicate these positions, what is in fact most relevant is the proportion of folk beliefs and intuitions that imply commitments on the compatibility question

with respect to one particular variety – namely, free willS. In this respect, both descriptive positions entail fairly strong commitments, insofar as they imply either that free willS is a compatibilist sense of free will (full stop), or that it is incompatibilist (full stop). That is, each view implies that the (descriptively) correct analysis of free willS lacks any significant commitment to the opposing position. In light of the foregoing points, descriptive compatibilism and incompatibilism may be understood broadly as follows:

[DC] A significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism. Moreover, it is false

that a significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is not compatible with determinism.

[DI] A significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is not compatible with determinism. Moreover, it is

false that a significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism.

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This characterization essentially takes the burden of proof that Vargas proposes for descriptive compatibilism (“it must hold that there is no important sense in which our ascriptions of free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with the thesis of determinism”), combines it with that which, on McKenna’s view, applies to descriptive incompatibilism (in Vargas’s terms, it must hold that there is no important sense in which our ascriptions of free will and moral 23 24 responsibility are compatible with determinism), and restricts both to free willS. This combination seems to me to retain the strengths of these positions while avoiding their weaknesses; in doing so, it appears to accurately reflect the dialectical commitments of compatibilism and incompatibilism in the descriptive arena. First, the proposal currently on offer avoids suggesting that the burden of proof for one of these positions is significantly lower than that for the other – thus circumventing one source of worry for both Vargas’s and McKenna’s accounts. It does this primarily by maintaining that both compatibilism and incompatibilism are, as descriptive accounts, committed to equally strong claims, insofar as both purport to capture every significant aspect of folk thought (on free

willS). While Vargas maintains that incompatibilism avoids this burden by conceding the existence of compatibilist varieties of free will, I argued above that this concession does not entitle the incompatibilist to claim that her position is vindicated if any notion of free agency is threatened by determinism. The notion so threatened must be especially important or significant, and it must be fully incompatibilist – not partly or incompletely so. By focusing on free willS specifically, the proposal detailed here allows that incompatibilism is consistent with the existence of varieties of free agency (other than free willS) that are compatible with determinism while reflecting the fact that, on most incompatibilist views, these compatibilist varieties fail to capture free will in the fullest or most important sense of the term. It thus accommodates the view that incompatibilists cannot proclaim victory if some significant aspect of pretheoretic thought or other implies that free will conflicts with determinism. If the pretheoretic notions

conducive to incompatibilism appear not to concern free willS, or if other significant aspects of

23 While McKenna does not explicitly state that this burden applies to descriptive incompatibilism, it follows directly from his claim that, for the compatibilist, ‘all that matters’ is that there is at least one compatibilist strand of pretheoretic thought. Descriptive compatibilism, on this view, is only falsified if there is no compatibilist strand of pretheoretic thought; presumably, this is descriptive incompatibilism. 24 To paraphrase McKenna (2009, 11), in evaluating DC and DI “everything” – or, at least, a lot – rides on what counts as a ‘significant’ number (or proportion) of beliefs. While I cannot entirely resolve this ambiguity (which strikes me as probably ineliminable), I do briefly comment on it in the final paragraph of this section. 31

folk thought relevant to free willS imply compatibilism, this should be cause for concern among incompatibilists. Perhaps most importantly, however, this way of situating burdens of proof reflects the

(plausible) thought that free willS is not appropriately labeled an ‘incompatibilist’ notion if a significant number of pretheoretic beliefs relevant to it imply compatibilism – and mutatis mutandis for ‘compatibilist’ labels. Suppose, for example, that investigation reveals an

‘important sense’ in which free willS is undermined by determinism, and another ‘important sense’ in which it is not. Vargas’s picture would then suggest that free willS is incompatibilist, while McKenna’s portrayal would characterize it as compatibilist. In fact, I think most impartial

observers would be inclined to judge in this event that free willS is not compatibilist or incompatibilist; rather, it has elements of both views, but vindicates neither. The account offered here supports this interpretation, implying – correctly, in my view – that significantly mixed results with respect to the (descriptive) compatibility question spell trouble for both of the traditional positions. That such a possibility exists at all highlights the fact that, in the descriptive domain, compatibilism and incompatibilism could both be false – that is, these views do not exhaust the range of possible responses to the descriptive question. (This is a further point of contrast between the present discussion and traditional approaches to free will, which tend to conceptualize the compatibility question as a yes or no affair – either free will is compatible with determinism or it isn’t.) As I have characterized these positions, DC is false if pretheoretic beliefs demonstrate a significant commitment to incompatibilism with respect to free willS, and DI is false if pretheoretic beliefs demonstrate a significant compatibilist commitment with respect to this notion. Call the hypothesis that both views are indeed false in this way descriptive variantism; on this view, pretheoretic beliefs about free willS display significant aspects of both positions. More explicitly:

[DV] A significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism. Moreover, a

significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is not compatible with determinism.

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The denial of descriptive variantism is descriptive invariantism (DIV for short); this view holds that either DC is true or DI is. This, I argue momentarily, is the position accepted (either explicitly or implicitly) in most contemporary discussions of the compatibility question. My own view, in contrast, is that DV is correct; this claim is defended in the ensuing chapters. Before closing this section, some brief remarks are in order concerning what counts as a ‘significant number’ of beliefs, as this phrase is employed in DC, DI, and DV. I am content to leave this aspect of descriptive accounts largely unanalyzed, for two reasons. First, while the notion of ‘significance’ introduces some vagueness at the borders of descriptive accounts, this vagueness is largely ineliminable, in the sense that disagreement is inevitable when it comes to this aspect of the descriptive question. That is, in many cases it just is vague whether or not a given set of intuitions constitutes a significant commitment to one or another view; reasonable people can disagree about whether a minority response is significant, and our portrayal of the discussion should reflect this fact. Second, I am fairly confident that investigation will support descriptive variantism on any sensible construal of ‘significant’, so it is mostly inconsequential, for present purposes, which of these construals is adopted. I will say, however, that descriptive variantism should not be understood as requiring anything close to a 50/50 split in folk intuitions between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Suppose data were to reveal that 80% of folk have exclusively compatibilist intuitions and 20% have exclusively incompatibilist intuitions.25 Should we declare descriptive compatibilism true? I doubt it. If one out of every five people consistently makes judgments that accord with incompatibilism, then as of this writing there are roughly 1.4 billion such people in the world.26 Surely this is a ‘significant’ aspect of folk thought, and one for which theorizing should account.27

2.4 Descriptive Commitments

Having laid out the conceptual terrain, we are now in a position to situate some extant philosophical work on free will within the contours of the descriptive positions outlined above.

25 Note that this is highly unlikely, since intuitions may vary not just between individuals but within individuals as well. The same person may have compatibilist intuitions in one context and incompatibilist intuitions in another. 26 The figure derives from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “world population clock,” according to which there are about 7 billion people in the world as of April 2012 (www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html). 27 One more comparison: in 2010, 15.1% of Americans (about 46.2 million) lived below the poverty line (Tavernise 2011). Surely this is significant; but it is 5% less than the proportion of incompatibilists envisioned above. 33

I have already argued that much of the philosophical literature is concerned primarily

with free willS, and have suggested further that this notion is generally interpreted as either unqualifiedly incompatibilist, in that it is never compatible with determinism, or unqualifiedly

compatibilist, in that determinism, in and of itself, never undermines free willS. These claims alone constitute acceptance of a type of invariantism, insofar as they imply the absence of a significant commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism with respect to free willS. What I have yet to show is that this commitment is taken to reflect pretheoretic thought about this notion, and thus that the invariantism generally accepted by free agency theorists extends to the descriptive arena. This is the goal of the present discussion. Readers of experimental philosophy are no doubt familiar with the litany of citations that often introduce work on free agency in that field; these citations, while often employed to motivate empirical research, also suggest philosophical commitments to DIV. Thus Ekstrom, for example, asserts that “we come to the table, nearly all of us, as pretheoretic incompatibilists” (2002, 310), and Pink claims that “we naturally think that the truth of causal determinism would definitely remove our freedom…we are natural incompatibilists” (2004, 13). These claims and others28 characterize folk thought as overwhelmingly incompatibilist, and in so doing suggest a commitment to DI – and, hence, to DIV. Moreover, such claims are not exclusively the product of incompatibilist philosophical work. For one, psychologists get in on the act as well: Maasen, W. Prinz, and Roth, for example, hold that “jargon of free will in everyday language requires us to accept local pockets of indeterminism in an otherwise deterministically conceived world view” (2003, 8).29 For another, appeals to pretheoretic compatibilism are also not uncommon; Hobart begins his defense of compatibilism with the claim that he will be discussing “free will in the natural and usual sense” (2008, 420), and (as noted above) Fischer contends that his brand of semicompatibilism “need not in any way call for revisions in the concept of moral responsibility or our actual responsibility practices” (2007a, 82). These claims seem to imply a commitment to DC (or, in Fischer’s case, an analog of DC concerning moral responsibility). It thus appears that many theorists from diverse backgrounds accept something like DIV.

28 See especially Kane (1999, 218), Pereboom (2001, xvi), and Cover and O’Leary Hawthorne (1996, 50–51), in addition to the works mentioned elsewhere in this section, for oft-cited claims to the effect that pretheoretic thought is predominantly incompatibilist. 29 See also W. Prinz (1997) and Bayer, Ferguson, and Gollwitzer (2003). 34

Recent work by Tamler Sommers (2010; 2012), however, sounds a note of caution for those who would move directly from these claims to conclusions about theorists’ considered descriptive views. While Sommers is generally sympathetic to experimental approaches, he worries that “directly probing intuitions about the compatibility question” may fail to engage the pretheoretic commitments most central to philosophical theorizing (2010, 205). In addressing the tendency of literature in experimental philosophy to motivate empirical work by “choosing from a menu of passages about the intuitiveness of incompatibilism” (2010, 205), he suggests:

What’s odd about this from a dialectical standpoint…is that the cited passages almost always come from introductory sections of incompatibilist articles or books. The role of these passages is largely rhetorical, to get readers into an incompatibilist mood. There is no incompatibilist argument… of the form: (1) we intuitively find free will and moral responsibility to be incompatible with determinism, and therefore (2) free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism…It would seem that in order to truly test the plausibility of the incompatibilist position, we need to examine the intuitions [that] support the premises and principles of their arguments and not their introductory rhetoric. (2010, 205–6, emphasis in original)30

Now, I have no objection to Sommers’s suggestion that empirical work investigate the intuitive plausibility of premises figuring in incompatibilist arguments, save to note that in the present context – which is explicitly concerned to address the compatibility question – intuitions about these premises are at best secondary sources of evidence relative to intuitions bearing directly on the compatibility question itself.31 However, Sommers’s comments also suggest a related worry that bears more directly on the current project. If, as I suspect, Sommers is right that most of the commonly cited passages expressing commitments to DI are largely rhetorical in nature, and if they play no significant role in the development of incompatibilist theories, then perhaps it is uncharitable to think that passages attributing pretheoretic commitments to the folk reflect the considered views of their authors with respect to the descriptive question. This suggests that it

30 Cf. Sommers (2012, 161–5). 31 This is not to deny, of course, that in other contexts intuitive reactions to these premises will be of primary importance. 35

may be inappropriate to draw conclusions about deeper commitments to DIV solely on the basis of what may simply be off-hand remarks. The problem with this line of argument, however, is that these passages cannot be so easily detached from the philosophical theorizing that they introduce. That is, claims about commonsense intuitions on the compatibility question often are implicated in the development of considered philosophical accounts in a way that suggests that these accounts are not independent of commitments to DIV. To see this, note first that rhetorical support for one’s view of free agency is just that – support for one’s view of free agency. While such support may not carry the import of philosophical argument, it is nonetheless designed to convince the reader to accept the proffered view. This is why allegations of pretheoretic incompatibilism come almost exclusively from incompatibilists, and mutatis mutandis for compatibilism. If these allegations had no argumentative import, one might wonder why authors’ assessments of pretheoretic views tend to concur so regularly with the theoretical positions they adopt.32 That such regular concurrence does occur suggests that what many of these theorists are doing is explicating and/or defending (what they take to be) the ‘commonsense’ view; this defense might appeal to original arguments, but they are arguments for a position rooted in pretheoretic notions. Take, for example, Galen Strawson’s ‘basic argument,’ which Sommers cites as an example of an argument that “[does] appeal to intuitions, but to intuitions about cases and narrower principles…rather than on the compatibility question itself” (2010, 206). Perhaps Strawson’s argument avoids appealing to intuitions about the compatibility question, but his defense of it does not:

It may be objected that the kind of freedom this argument shows to be impossible is so obviously impossible that it is not even worth considering. But the freedom that is shown to be impossible by this sort of argument against self-determination is just the kind of freedom that most people ordinary and unreflectively suppose themselves to possess, even though the idea that some sort of ultimate self-

32 A notable exception in this regard is Smart, who recommends compatibilism despite holding that “most men do not feel that blame…would be appropriate if a man’s action was the result of heredity plus environment” (1961, 305, emphasis in original). Of course, it is precisely these remarks that have led some to interpret Smart as a revisionist about folk notions of moral responsibility (Arneson 2003; Vargas 2011). 36

determination is presupposed by their notion of freedom has never occurred to them. (G. Strawson 2010, 26, my emphasis)

Strawson thus explicitly defends the relevance of his argument by appealing to pretheoretic beliefs. It follows from this that the actual content of these beliefs bears on Strawson’s argument, even if not by way of its premises. Some authors are admirably explicit about their attempts to capture the contours of pretheoretic thought on free agency and related notions. The elder Strawson, of course, is famous for this, having redirected attention to the reactive attitudes in order to “recover…a sense of what we mean, i.e. of all we mean” by moral language (2003, 91). Additionally, Fischer and Ravizza begin a defense of semicompatibilism by noting that “we shall be trying to articulate the inchoate, shared views about moral responsibility in (roughly speaking) a modern, Western democratic society” (1998, 10). Finally, O’Connor (2003) introduces his defense of agent causation this way: “What follows is strictly an essay in ‘descriptive metaphysics,’ charting the internal relationship among concepts in what I believe to be part of the commonsense picture of the world” (2003, 258, my emphasis). While O’Connor claims only that agent causation is ‘part of’ the commonsense view, other authors (as noted above) make more sweeping claims. The hypothesis that such authors also take themselves – perhaps unreflectively – to be engaging in descriptive metaphysics strikes me as a good bet; if it is correct, then the theories proposed by these authors reflect a commitment to something much like DIV. Still, Sommers’s point that theorists rarely use claims about folk thought in arguments for their preferred view is compelling; it suggests that I may be overstating the extent to which considered accounts of free agency reflect descriptive commitments. Notice, though, that this worry is a double-edged sword. Insofar as philosophers’ considered accounts do not capture what they take to be the dominant pretheoretic position, it is unclear why the notion that they do purport to capture is theoretically relevant.33 More importantly, I am not convinced that philosophers never rely on something like an argument of this sort. Of course, this ‘argument’ is not explicit; it is not put in standard form and rendered in predicate logic. Nonetheless, it seems to me that, in at least some cases, part of the point of appealing to folk views in introductory

33 Recall, in this connection, Mele’s contention that philosophical accounts unanchored in commonsense intuition “risk…having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as [their] subject matter” (2001, 27). 37

sections of articles or books (as Sommers notes is commonly the case) is to motivate an inference from the ‘premise’ that “most people find x pretheoretically intuitive” to the ‘conclusion’ that “we should accept x, barring good reason not to.” The idea here is that, if most people are intuitively attracted to, say, compatibilism, this is prima facie evidence in favor of that position; when stacked up alongside explicit arguments, it is hoped that the cumulative weight of these factors will convince the reader to accept one’s account. At the very least, such evidence is thought to show that one’s opponents bear the burden of presenting considerations of equal force against the folk view. If this is right, then claims about the content of pretheoretic intuitions are not dialectically idle; rather, they are seen as evidence that can supplement explicit argument in establishing philosophical conclusions. In light of the foregoing considerations, it seems reasonable to conclude that many philosophers, and at least some psychologists, accept something like DIV, and that this is especially so to the extent that the views they defend (which, with very few exceptions, are invariantist) are intended to reflect commonsense notions of free agency. Moreover, this endorsement of DIV, while often tacit, has played a substantial role in shaping debates relevant to the compatibility question. The question of whether this thesis is in fact true therefore has significant ramifications for both traditional and non-traditional accounts of free will. In the next chapter, I begin to address this important question.

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CHAPTER THREE:

DESCRIPTIVE VARIANTISM

In the preceding chapter, I defended the claim that the great majority of current work on free agency implicitly assumes that some version of descriptive invariantism (again, DIV)1 is correct. Overt acceptance of descriptive variantism (DV) thus constitutes a significant departure from philosophical orthodoxy; despite this, it is my view that the evidence in favor of DV outweighs the considerations that might be adduced against it. Consequently, the present chapter provides, largely on the basis of empirical considerations, an initial defense of DV as the most promising response to the descriptive question. Importantly, however, this defense will be partially incomplete. The arguments of the present chapter support the claim that data on pretheoretic intuitions, when taken at face value, overwhelmingly support descriptive variantism. What they will not show is that these data should in fact be taken this way; in particular, they will not address the question of whether any of the data favoring DV results primarily from performance errors, as opposed to competences. Consideration of this difficult issue is taken up in ensuing chapters. The main claim defended here is therefore best understood as a conditional hypothesis: if pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question, as elicited in empirical work on this issue, are by and large genuine,2 then descriptive variantism constitutes the best response to the descriptive version of this question. The chapter includes three sections. Sections one and two consider evidence that can be marshaled in favor of descriptive invariantism and variantism respectively; the primary argument of these sections is that an initial survey of work in this domain strongly favors the latter over the

1 Recall that descriptive invariantism, as formulated in Chapter Two, is the denial of descriptive variantism; the latter is the view that “a significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism. Moreover, a significant number of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is not compatible with determinism.” (Free willS, in turn, is free will “in the most theoretically powerful sense necessary for the most interpersonally demanding type of moral responsibility that plays a significant role in actual pretheoretic responsibility practices.”) See section 2.3 for additional discussion of these issues. 2 ‘Genuine’ intuitions, as defined in section 2.1, are those intuitions that reflect the operating of underlying competence(s), and thus do not result from performance errors. 39

former. In section three, I consider and respond to several objections that might be raised against this defense of DV.

3.1 Evidence for Descriptive Invariantism

If, as I suggested in the previous chapter, endorsement of DIV in philosophical circles is often assumed rather than explicitly defended, then it is hardly surprising that evidence favoring this thesis is not often adduced. Nonetheless, there are a few considerations that might be brought to bear in support of DIV. In fact, these considerations include several of the statements highlighted in the previous chapter as indicating commitments to this position. These statements may in many cases be taken not just as endorsements of invariantism, but also as anecdotal reports concerning the prevalence of certain intuitions amongst the folk. For example, when Pereboom claims that “beginning students typically recoil at the compatibilist response to the problem of moral responsibility,” this is some anecdotal evidence that, at least in his classrooms, pretheoretic thought favors incompatibilism (2001, xvi). As it happens, Pereboom is not alone in this assessment. The claims cited in the previous chapter come predominantly from incompatibilists; this is because attributions of pretheoretic incompatibilism are much more common than endorsements of pretheoretic compatibilism in the philosophical literature. That there is this general consensus among the available reports does constitute some evidence in favor of DI, and thus DIV. Of course, such evidence is defeasible, and I go on to suggest that it is more than outweighed by extant data in favor of DV. There are, however, at least two additional lines of thought suggesting that DIV, and not DV, accurately captures pretheoretic intuitions. One draws on folk beliefs in both free will and indeterminism to suggest that DI is true; the other appeals to empirical work to argue for DC. First, Vargas (2006; 2007a; 2013) has suggested that experimental evidence favors a diagnosis of commonsense thought as at least partly libertarian on the grounds that this evidence demonstrates widespread pretheoretic commitment to the theses that (a) we (at least sometimes) act freely, and (b) determinism is false. That there are such pretheoretic commitments is indisputable. Regarding (a), studies have conclusively shown that an overwhelming majority believe that “humans make decisions of their own free will” (Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran

40

2007), and that this belief persists in the face of alleged challenges to this notion arising from scientific investigation (Monroe and Malle 2010).3 Moreover, experimenters have repeatedly found that inducing pro-free will beliefs in participants fails to affect behavior (Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009; Stillman et al. 2010; Vohs and Schooler 2008); this, they argue, is because “belief in free will is the norm (so promoting that belief does not really change anything)” (Baumeister 2010, 27). Regarding (b), Nichols and Knobe (2007) found that, when presented with descriptions of both deterministic and indeterministic universes, “nearly all participants (over 90%) judged that the indeterministic universe is most similar to our own” (669); Sarkissian and colleagues (2010) have extended this finding cross-culturally. Nahmias (2006) reports similar data for particular events (e.g., a lightning bolt striking a tree at a particular time),4 suggesting that a significant number of folk understand complex physical processes non-deterministically.5 The question at issue, however, is whether this evidence should be taken to imply a pretheoretic commitment to libertarianism. Vargas suggests that it should, noting that “it is not obvious why we would suppose human decision-making is exempt from determinism unless we supposed ourselves to be agents of the sort libertarian theories endeavor to describe” (2013, 20– 1). In my view, however, this interpretation is too quick. It is one thing to assert that the folk think that (1) we are free and (2) determinism is false, and quite another to hold that they think that (1) we are free only if (2) determinism is false. The former is what the data indicate, while the latter is what is required to establish folk libertarianism. To put this another way: the data show that the folk are indeterminists – but so are most contemporary (post-theoretic) compatibilists.6 What is needed here is some evidence for folk incompatibilism; this is likely to

3 Nahmias and colleagues (2007) found that 80% to 95% of participants agreed with the free will statement cited above (exact percentages vary by condition; see original study for details), while Monroe and Malle found that only 26% of participants found a neuroscientific challenge to the existence of free will “believable” (2010, 217). 4 Participants were presented with three cases describing different events and asked whether, if the universe is re- created multiple times with the same laws and initial conditions, these events would occur “the exact same way” (219). 69 of 99 respondents answered ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’ for at least one scenario, including 40 participants who answered ‘no’ for all three cases. 5 A cynic about the applicability of folk thought to philosophical questions might wonder, given that my project here involves drawing conclusions about free will partly on the basis of folk beliefs about this topic, why these results fail to count as evidence that indeterminism is true. Briefly, the reason for this is that we have better methods for investigating the latter – methods (e.g., physics) that are unavailable when it comes to free will. 6 Recall from section 1.1 that contemporary compatibilists typically hold (largely in deference to quantum mechanics) that, even though determinism is likely false, if it were true this would not threaten free will. In fairness to Vargas, it should be noted that he is well aware of this point, and is quick to the note (in the paragraph following that from which the above citation is excerpted) that folk compatibilist intuitions are easily elicited in other contexts. 41

be obtained only by considering pretheoretic intuitions about deterministic cases (some of which are considered in detail below). In the meantime, we are justified only in concluding that, if the folk are by and large incompatibilists, then they are libertarians (since they believe we are in fact free). One implication of this is that – unsurprisingly – ‘hard incompatibilist’ views are out of the running as descriptive accounts of the folk position on free will. As to why we exhibit a pretheoretic commitment to indeterminism if not because we are (pretheoretically) libertarian, I take this to be partially an issue for future empirical research. I am inclined to think, however, that we often understand the world indeterministically for broadly phenomenological reasons. We often have the impression, when we act, that what we do is ‘up to us’, and it is not hard to see how this might lead to an indeterministic picture of human agency.7 Indeterminism in the natural world – e.g., the impression that lightning didn’t have to strike that tree just then – may well simply derive from the fact that we lack epistemic access to many of the causal factors that make sense of physical events. Complex physical processes like the weather are notoriously difficult to predict and explain; lacking universal predictive and explanatory power, we treat these processes as the result of indeterministic fluctuations. While this route to establishing DI thus appears to lack force, an alternative argument might be mounted to the effect that DC is the dominant pretheoretic position. This argument relies more directly on experimental data by appealing to studies indicating that folk intuitions are often strongly compatibilist. Central to such data is the early work of Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2004; 2005; 2008; henceforth NMNT), who found that, when given deterministic scenarios, participants very often hold that agents in these scenarios are free and responsible despite the deterministic implications of the cases. One such scenario is as follows:

Imagine that in the next century we discover all the laws of nature, and we build a supercomputer which can deduce from these laws of nature and from the current state of everything in the world exactly what will be happening in the world at any future time. It can look at everything about the way the world is and predict everything about how it will be with 100% accuracy. Suppose that such a supercomputer existed, and it looks at the state of the universe at a certain time on March 25, 2150 A.D., twenty years before Jeremy Hall is born. The computer

7 This is not to say that agency requires this picture. 42

then deduces from this information and the laws of nature that Jeremy will definitely rob Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM on January 26, 2195. As always, the supercomputer’s prediction is correct; Jeremy robs Fidelity Bank at 6:00 PM on January 26, 2195. (Nahmias et al. 2008, 87)

In response to this case, 76% of NMNT’s participants asserted that Jeremy robs the bank “of his own free will” (87). These data are consistent with results they obtained for positive and neutral actions: slight modifications to the scenario revealed that 68% of respondents thought Jeremy saved a child’s life of his own free will, while 79% believed that he went jogging of his own free will. Moreover, judgments of moral responsibility closely tracked assessments of free agency, with 83% saying that Jeremy is “morally blameworthy for robbing the bank,” and 88% suggesting that he is “morally praiseworthy for saving the child” (87). Similar results were obtained in response to two additional scenarios utilizing different actions and descriptions of determinism.8 On this basis, NMNT tentatively conclude that “most laypersons do not have incompatibilist intuitions, though this preliminary work should be supplemented” so as to gain a more complete understanding of folk thought relevant to the compatibility question (2008, 97, emphasis in original). Two further studies provide some of the supplementation sought by NMNT; these studies provide additional support for a compatibilist interpretation of folk pretheoretic commitments. Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley (2006) gathered data on responsibility attributions while systematically varying (1) the degree to which the putatively responsible agent was constrained to perform the action in question and (2) whether or not the agent ‘identified with’ this action – that is, whether he desired and endorsed the action performed. Their scenarios depicted a man, Bill, who discovers that his wife is having an affair with his best friend, Frank. They find themselves on a hijacked plane, and Bill is ordered to shoot Frank; he complies either happily or reluctantly with the hijackers’ orders. Woolfolk and colleagues found that ratings of Bill’s responsibility for Frank’s death increased when Bill identified with his action; of note for the present investigation, this was true even in ‘high’ and ‘absolute’ constraint conditions – the latter

8 One such case characterized determinism in terms of the re-creation of the universe with the same initial conditions and laws of nature, while the other depicts a world in which “the beliefs and values of every person are caused completely by the combination of one’s genes and one’s environment” (Nahmias et al. 2008, 88). Folk responses to a vignette derived from the former scenario are assessed by Nahmias and Murray (2011) and Murray and Nahmias (2012); this vignette, and data relevant to it, are considered in detail in Chapter Five. 43

of which included Bill’s being given a ‘compliance drug’ that rendered him “unable to resist the demands of powerful authorities,” resulting in his “feeling like a puppet” and “passively observing his body moving in space” (292). Since determinism in and of itself clearly poses no threat to one’s ability to ‘identify with’ actions, data indicating that folk responsibility attributions are based on identification appears to constitute further evidence in favor of pretheoretic compatibilism. The second study, conducted by Miller and Feltz (2011), sought to test folk intuitions on ‘Frankfurt-style cases’ in which agents perform actions despite allegedly being unable to do otherwise.9 Their cases described an agent who is deliberating about whether to steal a car, and who – unbeknownst to him – has had a device implanted in his brain that, at a particular time, will “certainly cause” his deciding to steal the car if he does not decide this on his own just then (405). As it happens, just at that time the agent decides on his own to steal the car and does so; thus, the device is never activated. Results indicated that most folk were willing to attribute a moderate degree of responsibility to this agent. For example, when asked to rate their degree of agreement with the statement “Mr. Jones is morally responsible for deciding to steal the car” on a seven-point Likert scale, the mean response in one study was 5.27 (higher numbers indicate greater agreement). Again, this constitutes some evidence for pretheoretic compatibilism; if moral responsibility is attributed to agents even when these agents lack the ability to do otherwise, then whether or not determinism precludes such an ability would appear to be irrelevant when folk notions of responsibility are at issue. While the Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley and Miller and Feltz data provide some support for the claim that many folk express pretheoretic compatibilist intuitions, in the present context their results should be interpreted with caution. First, both studies asked only about moral responsibility, to the exclusion of free will; care must therefore be taken in assessing the relevance of these results to the current discussion, since this discussion concerns only the latter notion.10 Additionally, responsibility attributions in the study from Woolfolk and colleagues are

9 The literature on Frankfurt-style cases is extensive, and will not be reviewed here; McKenna and Widerker (2003) provide an excellent overview of this literature for interested readers. It should be noted that the claim that such cases genuinely preclude alternative possibilities is controversial. 10 While I believe there is reason for caution regarding the use of data on moral responsibility to draw conclusions about free will, I also think that the close correlation between intuitions on these two notions allows for careful inference from the former to the latter. (See sections 1.2 above and 3.3 below for more discussion of this point.) I thus do not find this consideration alone to be decisive in the present context; however, it is my view that in 44

at times quite low, reaching a mean of only 3.25 (on a seven-point scale) in the absolute constraint condition – even when Bill expressed identification with his action.11 Miller and Feltz, meanwhile, found that many respondents thought that the agent in their cases could have done otherwise, despite attempts to describe the case in a way that eliminated this possibility.12 This pair of studies thus provides only limited support for a compatibilist interpretation of folk intuitions; nonetheless, in conjunction with the data reported by NMNT they strengthen the case for such an interpretation. There is, then, some evidence that DC – and, by extension, DIV – is true. This evidence, however, is hardly overwhelming. In particular, the sizable minority responses in these experiments should not be overlooked; for example, NMNT’s data indicate that anywhere between 10% and 30% of responses to any given question withhold free will and moral responsibility from agents inhabiting deterministically described worlds. This alone, I have suggested above, may constitute a ‘significant’ pretheoretic commitment to incompatibilism.13 Additional empirical work calls DIV further into question; it is to consideration of this work that I now turn.

3.2 Evidence for Descriptive Variantism

The case for preferring DV over DIV begins with a seminal study conducted by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe (2007, henceforth NK). These authors had participants read scenarios describing a pair of universes. In the deterministic Universe A, “everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it,” so that when agents make decisions, “if everything in this universe was exactly the same” up until the decision, “then it had to happen” that this decision would occur (669, emphasis in original).14 In the indeterministic Universe B,

conjunction with the additional concerns raised in this paragraph, the case against employing this data in support of invariantism is a strong one. 11 In the absolute constraint, non-identified condition – where Bill was “horrified” at what he was doing – the mean rating for Bill’s responsibility was 2.25 (Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley 2006, 288). 12 Interestingly, though, such judgments did not interact with responsibility ratings, in the sense that assessments of moral responsibility were stable regardless of judgments concerning the agent’s ability to do otherwise. 13 See the closing remarks of section 2.3 for some discussion of this issue. 14 There is some debate as to whether NK’s description of Universe A accurately captures determinism; in particular, some have held that it has problematic features more reminiscent of fatalism then determinism (see, in particular, Nahmias and Murray (2011) and Murray and Nahmias (2012), both of which are discussed in detail in Chapter Five). Fortunately, the aspects of NK’s data that are relevant here have been replicated several times using 45

“almost everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it. The one exception is human decision making” (669, emphasis in original).15 In this universe, then, “even if everything…was exactly the same” until the time of an agent’s decision, “it did not have to happen” that she would decide as she did (669, emphases in original). Following this description of Universes A and B, participants were assigned to either abstract or concrete conditions. Participants in the abstract condition were simply asked whether, in Universe A, it is possible “for a person to be fully morally responsible for their [sic] actions” (670). Those in the concrete condition, by contrast, were asked to read the following short vignette:

In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and 3 children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family. (2007, 670)

After reading this case, participants in the concrete condition were asked whether Bill is “fully morally responsible for killing his wife and children” (2007, 670). The results are striking: in the concrete condition, 72% of participants asserted that Bill is fully morally responsible for his act, while in the abstract condition only 14% allowed that agents in Universe A can be fully morally responsible. These results point to the existence of a fundamental distinction in pretheoretic thought on the compatibility issue: certain contexts elicit predominantly compatibilist-friendly intuitions, while others generate primarily incompatibilist-friendly judgments.16 NK suggest two primary explanations for this distinction: it may be that folk intuitions vary according to level of

different cases and descriptions of determinism. Thus, the conclusions I draw from consideration of these data should remain valid even if NK’s particular depiction of a deterministic world is indeed problematic. 15 The universes were not identified to participants as either deterministic or indeterministic. 16 To say that an intuition or judgment is compatibilist- or incompatibilist-‘friendly,’ as I do here and elsewhere below, is just to say that its content is conducive to compatibilism or incompatibilism, respectively. I adopt this terminology because it might, in my view, be misleading to say that a pretheoretic intuition is (in)compatibilist. On one reading of this last claim, it implies that those who have these intuitions are familiar with the philosophical theses of compatibilism and incompatibilism (and determinism, etc.); this, of course, is unlikely to be the case when pretheoretic intuitions are at issue. Labeling these intuitions (in)compatibilist-friendly is intended to help clarify this point. 46

concreteness, or it may be that the distinction results from a difference in responses to high- and low-affect scenarios. In an attempt to distinguish between these hypotheses, they conducted a follow-up study. Participants were split into four conditions in a 2 (determinism/indeterminism) X 2 (high-affect/low-affect) experimental design. All participants received the original descriptions of universes A and B, followed by additional statements:

[High-Affect Condition] As he has done many times in the past, Bill stalks and rapes a stranger. Is it possible that Bill is fully morally responsible for raping the stranger?

[Low-Affect Condition] As he has done many times in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is it possible that Mark is fully morally responsible for cheating on his taxes? (675)

In the deterministic condition, Bill/Mark is said to be in Universe A; in the indeterministic condition, each is in Universe B. As it turns out, participants in the indeterministic condition were overwhelmingly willing to attribute responsibility to both agents: 95% said Bill was fully responsible for raping a stranger, and 89% made the corresponding claim about Mark. The deterministic condition, however, revealed a marked difference, with 64% holding Bill responsible compared to only 23% for Mark. NK contend that the level of concreteness is essentially constant across the Mark and Bill cases; consequently, they argue that the best explanation for this data appeals to the obvious differences in affect between these scenarios to explain the divergent results.17 Whatever the explanation for this distinction, it has proved remarkably robust. In addition to replicating NK’s data using their original cases, Nahmias and Murray (2011) found evidence of a similar difference in responses between abstractly- and concretely-phrased versions of an NMNT scenario.18 Sarkissian and colleagues (2010) extended NK’s abstract

17 I discuss potential explanations of this phenomenon further in later chapters. 18 Interestingly, the percentages of respondents rejecting free will and moral responsibility were significantly lower for all versions of the NMNT cases relative to the NK cases. Specifically, when given NK’s original scenarios, 73% of Nahmias and Murray’s subjects in the abstract condition and 29% in the concrete condition denied that free will and moral responsibility were possible in the cases as described; this is roughly consistent with NK’s original results. (Nahmias and Murray combined responses to multiple prompts concerning free will and moral 47

finding cross-culturally, demonstrating that participants in America, India, Hong Kong, and Colombia all agree that (abstractly) people in Universe A are not fully morally responsible for what they do.19 Additionally, Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran (2007) found evidence for the distinction across a range of different scenarios tested on a large subject pool (N = 632). The abstract scenarios described a race of “Ertans” whose scientists have become convinced that either psychological or neurological events preceding Ertan decisions “will definitely cause” those decisions; concrete scenarios added a description of Smit, an Ertan for whom antecedent psychological/neurological events “will definitely cause” his ensuing decision to kill his wife/donate a large sum of money to charity (223). The distinction in question was found for both psychological and neurological scenarios for bad actions, and a smaller, non-significant difference was found for both scenarios with respect to good actions. Finally, Roskies and Nichols (2008) found that for abstractly phrased deterministic scenarios similar in wording to the NK cases, the folk are significantly more likely to hold that both free will and moral responsibility are possible if the universe is described as our own, rather than an alternative universe much like ours.20 This is plausibly taken as further evidence of the distinction at issue, insofar as events occurring in alternate universes are likely both (1) conceptualized more abstractly and (2) less prone to elicit strong affective responses than events in our own world. The foregoing results clearly support DV over DIV, insofar as they imply that in some contexts pretheoretic notions of free agency exhibit primarily compatibilist-friendly tendencies, while in other contexts these notions are more conducive to incompatibilism. The question of interest here, however, is whether this evidence is strong enough to overturn that in favor of DIV. It seems to me that the answer is overwhelmingly yes, for three main reasons. First, the contextual variability noted here is far too pervasive to be dismissed as some sort of experimental artifact. As noted above, it has been replicated numerous times, and has been found for data culled from both (a) respondents with diverse cultural backgrounds and (b) scenarios that vary widely in their depiction of deterministic worlds and the actions taking place in those worlds. Additionally, the variability at issue is not restricted to the domain of free and

responsibility into an aggregate score for analysis; individual scores are not reported.) In contrast, only 48% of NMNT abstract participants and 18% of subjects given NMNT concrete drew this conclusion. Despite this difference, the NMNT cases – like the NK cases – still exhibit the abstract/concrete distinction. (For further detail regarding this study, see Chapter Five.) 19 The study did not test responses to NK’s concrete scenario. 20 This study is considered further in section 4.1. 48

responsible agency. Similar disparities have been found in folk responses to scenarios designed to probe intuitions about moral permissibility (Greene et al. 2001; Greene et al. 2004; Cushman, Young, and Hauser 2006; Hauser et al. 2007), the moral/conventional distinction (Nichols 2002), attitudes toward punishment (Carlsmith, Darley, and Robinson 2002; Small and Loewenstein 2005), and even epistemological skepticism (Nichols, Stich, and Weinberg 2003; see also Sinnott-Armstrong 2008). It is thus highly unlikely that the existence of this distinction will be called into question anytime soon. Second, the evidence for DV trumps that for DIV because the former can be employed to give a plausible account of the latter, whereas no such account can be easily provided by proponents of DIV. If folk judgments really do vary on the basis of affect or concreteness, then it is unsurprising that the results found by NMNT, Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley, and Miller and Feltz support a compatibilist interpretation, since these studies all probed intuitions about concrete, affectively charged scenarios.21 Additionally, contextual variability explains anecdotal reports of pretheoretic incompatibilism on the part of philosophers. These reports concern the intuitions of undergraduates, generally elicited in philosophy classrooms. What context is more abstract (and often less emotional) than that? DIV, in contrast, offers no ready account of the fact that folk have compatibilist intuitions in some contexts and incompatibilist intuitions in others. At the very least, then, proponents of DIV will have to provide an additional explanation for apparent variation in folk judgments, whereas the hypothesis offered here makes sense of a broad range of disparate data in one fell swoop.22 Third, extant data provides evidence for an additional sort of variation with respect to folk assessments of free will. Virtually all of the data canvassed to this point include a substantial number of minority responses – judgments expressing disagreement with the mainstream position on free agency regarding the scenario in question. For example, 24% of responses to NMNT’s original case deny that Jeremy robs the bank freely, and 28% of NK’s participants failed to hold Bill fully morally responsible for killing his family. Meanwhile, NK’s

21 As noted above, some of the NMNT studies also elicited intuitions about neutral actions (e.g. going jogging) as opposed to high-affect cases. While these data present some challenges for accounts of the distinction presently at issue couched solely in terms of affect, they are consistent with the possibility that concreteness explains variation in intuitions about free agency (since NMNT’s neutral scenarios still concern particular agents performing particular actions). I return to this issue in Chapter Four. 22 One way to provide the additional explanation required for a defense of DIV would be to provide an account of variation in folk intuitions that appeals to performance errors as the source of this variation. The plausibility of this method is considered briefly in section 3.3 below, and in more detail in Chapters Four through Six. 49

follow-up study found that 36% don’t hold Bill (fully) responsible for his act of rape, and 23% do hold Mark’s arranging to cheat on his taxes to this standard. Minority responses of this size seem, to me at least, to constitute evidence for a further sense in which the correct account of folk views on free agency implies DV. While majority responses are important, our characterization of pretheoretic thought must not overlook other positions. This is particularly so when support for these positions runs in the neighborhood of 20% or more; as noted above, responses of this frequency are plausibly taken to represent a significant aspect of folk thought. It thus seems that DV is true, not only due to contextual variation, but as a result of substantial divergences in views across the folk population as well. On this basis, it seems likely that DV, and not DIV, represents the most adequate initial response to the descriptive question. Further issues remain with respect to this question; prominent among these are the questions of (1) exactly which contexts are likely to elicit compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions and (2) whether these intuitions are indeed genuine, or whether a significant proportion of them might be explained by appeal to performance errors. Answering these questions requires more detailed discussion of them; the ensuing chapters attempt to provide this discussion. Here, I consider some final issues arising from my initial defense of the claim that any such response, if adequate, will entail DV.

3.3 Objections and Replies

When considering challenges that might be raised against the defense of DV provided here, it is important to keep in mind, as I have stressed above, that this defense is preliminary: later chapters refine and extend the arguments raised thus far, and provide further details regarding the strength and scope of much of the data gestured at above. Despite this, our discussion has progressed far enough to permit discussion of several initial worries that might be raised concerning my claims about DV. In the present section, I attempt to address some of these worries. As I see it, there are essentially two types of concerns one might have about the defense of DV provided thus far. First, one could challenge my interpretation of the data invoked here in support of DV; perhaps these data do not bear on the compatibility question in the ways I suggest above. Second, issues might be raised concerning the validity of these data; perhaps they simply

50

misrepresent folk commitments on the compatibility question. I begin by considering objections of the first type, and then move to discussion of concerns related to the latter point. Unlike objections of the second type, worries concerning my interpretation of the data cited here do not directly challenge the existence of variability in pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question. Rather, these worries question whether the variability at issue is best

construed as variability with respect to intuitions about free wills as opposed to some other notion. (Recall that free wills, as characterized in the preceding chapter, is “free agency in the most theoretically powerful sense necessary for the most interpersonally demanding type of moral responsibility that plays a significant role in actual pretheoretic responsibility practices.”23) There are, I take it, two primary concerns in this regard. First, a number of the studies cited above probed intuitions on moral responsibility and not free will as such; as I acknowledged above, one might legitimately wonder whether such intuitions can tell us much about the latter notion. Second, it is unclear whether those data that do concern free will directly are getting at

free willS; perhaps these data concern free will only in some lesser sense. Each of these points deserves consideration. Regarding moral responsibility, studies investigating this notion in conjunction with free will have generally found similar intuitions concerning the two subjects (Nahmias 2006; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Feltz, Cokely, and Nadelhoffer 2009); this occurs to such an extent that responses on free will and moral responsibility questions are occasionally combined into composite scores (Nahmias and Murray 2011). No study, to my knowledge, has ever found judgments concerning one of these notions to be entirely independent of judgments concerning the other. Where moral responsibility differs from free will, it is generally the case that folk are more willing to ascribe moral responsibility to deterministic agents than they are to say that these agents acted freely; the percentage of participants ascribing free will to agents often lags behind the percentage attributing moral responsibility by about 10% (Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias et al. 2005; Nahmias et al. 2008; Roskies and Nichols 2008). It is thus possible that some folk, in certain situations, treat moral responsibility compatibilistically while reporting intuitions implying that determinism precludes free will. (Note that, if true, this would constitute yet another way in which folk intuitions support DV.)

23 See section 2.3. 51

Concerning the present discussion, my view is that these data generally warrant cautious inference from results pertaining to moral responsibility to conclusions about folk notions of free agency. The correlations often found between responses concerning these notions suggest that many folk – like most philosophers – understand free will to be a necessary condition for responsibility;24 as such, applications of moral responsibility will generally track corresponding applications of free will (allowing, of course, for the slight differences noted in the preceding paragraph). Additionally, much of the data reviewed here did find variation concerning free will in particular (Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Roskies and Nichols 2008; Nahmias and Murray 2011). While the NK studies used as the basis for my interpretation are, admittedly, restricted to the study of moral responsibility, replications of their scenarios in terms of free will have been found to yield similar results (Feltz, Cokely, and Nadelhoffer 2009; Nahmias and Murray 2011). It therefore seems likely that DV holds for both moral responsibility and free will. A more difficult question concerns the extent to which folk responses on free will may be

treated as concerning free willS in particular. Now, I admit that I cannot prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that data on free will are data on free willS specifically. I can, however, note a complete absence of any arguments (of which I am aware) to the effect that these data concern some less powerful or demanding variety of free will.25 Moreover, it’s at best unclear why study participants would apply less robust notions to these scenarios, particularly when many of them concern fairly serious infractions (murder and the like). Of further note in this connection is that NK’s surveys asked participants whether the agents in their scenarios were fully morally responsible. On one plausible interpretation of this phrase, to be ‘fully’ morally responsible for an action (or a state of affairs, etc.), is to be responsible for that action (state of affairs, etc.) in the most demanding sense possible; if this is how participants interpreted this phrase, then it

seems likely that their responses implicate free willS as the variety of control underlying their

24 This description of the relationship between free will and moral responsibility is rough; a more precise version would include qualifications designed to accommodate ‘tracing-type’ cases and other complexities. (See section 1.1 on this point.) I take it, though, that the formulation provided above will suffice for present purposes. 25 Recall that the notions of power and demandingness at issue here are a function of the demands to which agents are answerable when they are free or responsible in the relevant sense. (Again, a notion of free will or moral responsibility is not ‘more demanding’ simply in virtue of positing additional criteria that must be satisfied for this notion to apply.) See section 3 of the preceding chapter for more discussion of this point. 52

responsibility ascriptions.26 Thus, theorists who would argue that the data cited above concern multiple varieties of free agency should, at the very least, produce an account of (1) which varieties these are, (2) why pretheoretic thought is best explained by positing these different varieties, and (3) which studies concern which types of free agency. When such an account is provided, it may be assessed according to its merits; in its absence, it is unclear why pretheoretic thought should be understood to involve these distinctions. Let us turn now to consider objections of the second type: that is, concerns regarding the validity of the data appealed to here in support of DV. Unlike worries of the previous variety, these objections directly seek to undermine my claim that there is pervasive variation in folk intuitions on the compatibility question. One way to raise such an objection is to challenge the ecological validity of the studies considered above; another involves questioning whether observed variation is indeed genuine, in the sense that it accurately represents competent judgments on the part of the folk. Worries about ecological validity can, in the present context, be pressed by noting the uniformity of the methods utilized thus far in investigating pretheoretic intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Of note in this regard is that these studies all investigate folk intuitions about hypothetical scenarios; consequently, it is unclear whether the variability they find would persist with respect to other experimental formats – let alone in the context of actual, everyday practices. This is a fair criticism, and I agree that it would be desirable to develop and implement new methods for revealing folk commitments on the compatibility question, although I still maintain that extant evidence strongly favors DV. The adequacy of descriptive accounts should be assessed on the basis of the best available evidence; as of this writing, that evidence points clearly toward divergent folk commitments on the compatibility question. One additional method that has been employed to investigate this issue involves asking people open-ended questions about free will and related phenomena (Monroe and Malle 2010; Stillman, Baumeister, and Mele 2011). Monroe and Malle (2010), for example, asked respondents to “explain in a few lines what you think it means to have free will” (214, emphasis removed). Participants then read the following statement: “neuroscientists claim that free will is a false impression; that all of our behavior is caused by our neural impulses; and that any

26 For additional discussion of how the phrase ‘fully morally responsible’ might be interpreted by experimental participants, see section 4.3. 53

feelings of controlling our actions are an illusion” (217, emphasis removed). They were asked whether they agreed and, if not, how they would argue against this claim. On the basis of open- ended responses to the latter question, Monroe and Malle tentatively suggest the following:

We might count those who plainly affirmed choice or shielded themselves from the challenge [i.e. reaffirmed free will by appealing to unrelated considerations – religion, common sense, etc.] as incompatibilists and those who attempted reconciliation [between free will and neuroscience] in one form or another as compatibilists. The remaining quarter of respondents who accepted the neuroscience claim without reservation may be added to the compatibilist camp…If these classifications are correct, then about 2/3 of our sample are compatibilists. However, the limited research to date should not instill great confidence in this ad-hoc categorization. (Monroe and Malle 2010, 220)

One might think that these results represent a prima facie difficulty for the interpretation offered here. Since the context created by this study (in which participants are asked for general reflections about free will and neuroscience) is plausibly taken to be abstract, it might be expected to elicit predominantly incompatibilist intuitions; this, of course, is not what the authors appear to have found. There are, however, some reasons to think that the data reported here in fact favor acceptance of DV. First, Monroe and Malle’s interpretation of their results suggests significant variation in intuitions across their subject pool. If, in this context, two-thirds of participants indeed leaned toward compatibilism while the other third expressed incompatibilist inclinations, this result would support DV independently of any distinction between abstract/low-affect and concrete/high-affect contexts. Second, this interpretation of the data is, as the authors themselves acknowledge, not unproblematic. For one, it is at best unclear why affirming choice and ‘shielding’ imply incompatibilism, while reconciling free will with neuroscience commits one to a compatibilist picture. It appears to be equally open to compatibilists to respond to neuroscientific challenges to free will through shielding and choice affirmation, and some philosophical incompatibilists (e.g. Kane (1996)) have in fact attempted to reconcile their accounts with existing neuroscientific theories. Additionally, participants who accept the claim

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that neuroscience undermines free will need not be committed to compatibilism. Such participants might be compatibilists responding to a perceived reductionist threat from neuroscience, but they equally might be incompatibilists denying that we can be free if all of our behavior is caused by ‘neural impulses.’ Without further research, it is unclear whether intuitions elicited in the context created by Monroe and Malle’s study support compatibilism or incompatibilism; consequently, their study as it stands is consistent with the contextual variation outlined above. Another route to questioning my defense of DV challenges the claim that this hypothesis best explains all of the extant data on folk intuitions relevant to the compatibility question. I noted above that one strength of DV is its ability to account for apparently widely divergent experimental results bearing on these intuitions, but this ability is only required if there really are such divergent results – that is, if the intuitions in question are genuine. Thus, one way to defend DIV as the correct account of pretheoretic thought holds that either compatibilist or incompatibilist pretheoretic intuitions do not reflect the competence(s) underlying judgments of free agency; in short, the hypothesis goes, these intuitions result predominantly from performance errors. Two points about this line of thought are of immediate interest. First, I suspect that this is the only viable way for a defender of invariantism to account for apparent variation in folk intuitions; given the clear pervasiveness of the variation at issue, DIV can probably be retained only by defending the claim that this variation is merely apparent, and that genuine folk intuitions – that is, those that properly reflect the competence(s) at issue – are unilaterally either compatibilist or incompatibilist. Second, some hypotheses of just this type have been advanced in the literature. Nichols and Knobe (2007), for their part, tentatively suggest that affect biases folk responses, leading study participants to incorrectly apply what is a largely incompatibilist notion of free agency in concrete contexts. Alternatively, Nahmias and his colleagues (2006; 2011; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias and Murray 2011) have argued that in abstract contexts folk tend to incorrectly take determinism to entail that important features of agency are ‘bypassed’; pretheoretic intuitions unencumbered by this mistake are, in their view, primarily compatibilist. Now, adequately addressing these accounts is a complex issue, and one that I consider in detail in the following chapters. By way of a preliminary defense, however, I think it is fair to

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say that DV, and not DIV, has preferred status as the default account of the data at issue. That is, given the pervasiveness of contextual variation, we are justified in treating this variation as genuine unless and until we are given good reason to suppose otherwise. Moreover, even if performance error hypotheses are vindicated, they seem unlikely to account for all of the variability inherent in the folk view. Such a hypothesis might show that many – or even most – of, say, compatibilist intuitions result from performance errors, but the idea that it will impugn every such intuition while justifying every opposing one seems doubtful. For example, data bearing on Nahmias’s ‘bypassing’ hypothesis suggests that 80% of those responding incompatibilistically to his version of NK’s abstract scenario are making erroneous inferences about the implications of this case (Nahmias and Murray 2011, 204). Even if this is true, though, it implies that the other 20% are not making errors – and are still treating the scenario as precluding free agency. This may well constitute a ‘significant’ incompatibilist commitment on the part of the folk, in the sense of ‘significance’ explicated in the preceding chapter. Thus, performance error hypotheses do not, all by themselves, challenge DV; it is possible that DV is true even if substantial proportions of the data cited above result from error. Nonetheless, the possibility that some performance error hypothesis might successfully weaken the evidential basis for DV is one that merits further consideration. In particular, the hypotheses defended by Nichols and Knobe and Nahmias and colleagues present fairly direct challenges to the view defended here; consequently, it is of significant interest whether DV can be adequately defended against these challenges. This issue is addressed in the following pair of chapters: Chapter Four addresses Nichols and Knobe’s ‘affective performance error’ account, while Chapter Five considers Nahmias and colleagues’ ‘bypassing hypothesis.’ There, I argue that each of these accounts fails to convincingly undermine DV as the best response to the descriptive compatibility question.

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CHAPTER FOUR:

AFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE ERRORS

In Chapter Three, I argued for the conditional claim that if pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question are (by and large) genuine, in the sense that they do not result from performance errors,1 then descriptive variantism (again, DV for short)2 represents the most adequate descriptive position with respect to free agency. What is needed now is reason to think that the antecedent of this conditional is in fact true – that is, that the intuitions elicited in the studies considered in previous chapters are indeed genuine in this sense. The goal of this and succeeding chapters is to argue for this claim. This task is a difficult one, in part because there is, to my knowledge, no generally accepted method of distinguishing behavior impacted by performance system errors from that reflecting the unimpeded operation of competences. Moreover, it is highly likely that, with respect to the present topic, many studies elicit a mixture of competent responses and those resulting from error; consequently, it is difficult to defend any very general claims concerning the provenance of the judgments cited above in support of DV. As noted in the preceding chapter, however, it seems fair to say that the burden of proof in this regard lies with proponents of performance error hypotheses; participants’ behavior in a given experiment should be treated as reflecting competences unless and until one is given good reason to think otherwise. In the present context, then, it suffices to show that no such reason has been, or is likely to be, forthcoming: that is, to defend DV one need only demonstrate that performance error hypotheses are unlikely to explain enough contextual variation to call this thesis into question. I propose to tackle this complex issue in several stages. I begin, in the first section of this chapter, by distinguishing two potential accounts of the source of the contextual variation at issue: one appealing to affect, and the other to abstraction (as opposed to concreteness). I then consider the most prominent performance error hypothesis appealing to each type of mechanism. This chapter evaluates the ‘affective performance error’ account of Nichols and Knobe (2007);

1 Recall that my usage of the term ‘genuine’ in reference to intuitions (and beliefs, etc.) serves simply to pick out those intuitions that result from competences as opposed to performance errors. (See section 2.1 on this point.) 2 See Chapter Two for detailed discussion of the contours of descriptive variantism and related descriptive hypotheses. 57

section two provides an overview of this account, while section three raises some challenges for it. In Chapter Five, I consider a view, defended by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues (Nahmias 2006; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012), that postulates abstraction as the source of significant error; there, I raise some challenges for that view as well. As these hypotheses together represent the most detailed attempts to attribute a significant proportion of the intuitions discussed in the previous chapter to performance errors, challenging them lends further support to my claim that these intuitions are most plausibly treated as genuine, and not as performance errors. Finally, in Chapter Six I briefly consider some reasons to think that other performance error accounts will also likely fail to undermine DV; this should further strengthen the status of that thesis as a justifiable response to the compatibility question. In accordance with this structure, I now turn to an investigation of affect and abstraction.

4.1 Affect vs. Abstraction

The previous chapter defended descriptive variantism largely by appealing to contextual variation in pretheoretic intuitions. That this variation exists is generally not in dispute among theorists working in this arena; there is, however, less agreement concerning its sources. This is so, not just with respect to whether certain intuitions result from performance errors, but also with regard to the contextual features that produce these intuitions in the first place. For one, it is disputed whether contextual variation results primarily from differences in affect or abstraction; for another, what exactly ‘abstraction’ amounts to remains unclear. In Chapter Three, I deliberately declined to address these matters. Since the claims defended there required only the existence of contextual variation, discussion of the specific sources of this variation was unnecessary. In the present context, however, it will help to clarify these issues. I thus begin by contrasting affect with abstraction and clarifying the nature of each; this should engender greater clarity with respect to the performance error accounts discussed in this and subsequent chapters. Let’s start with the following: what is affect, and how does it differ from concreteness? While I have no general theory of affect, I can say that as I understand the term, affective reactions are closely tied to emotions and feelings (I use ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ in non-technical

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senses here). Standardly, emotional reactions involve the experience of states like anger, sadness, joy, and so on; they are typically either positively or negatively valenced and may be roughly contrasted with ‘cognitive’ states, which tend to involve information processing in a more neutral sense (Greene 2008, 40).3 Importantly, though, there may be affective states that are not also emotional states: possibilities here include moods, sentiments, some attitudes, bodily sensations like itches and pains, and even motivational states like urges, wants, and desires.4 Additionally, it should be kept in mind that the term ‘affect’ admits of a relative sense in which one may speak of some state as being more or less ‘affective’ than another. Reactions that one might intuitively think of as ‘unemotional’ may nonetheless be affectively charged relative to states that are even more dispassionate. An ‘affective account’ of contextual variability in pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question is, then, an account that explains the variability at issue primarily in terms of fluctuations in the mental states and processes outlined above; such an account is a ‘performance error’ account if it treats this fluctuation as conducive to error under certain conditions. The precise contours of these accounts will naturally depend partly on which states are properly taken to count as ‘affective’; here, I am content to use ‘affect’ in a fairly broad sense (encompassing, minimally, all of the phenomena mentioned in the preceding paragraph) so as not to unfairly preclude potential explanations of the contextual variability at issue in affective terms. It is also not difficult to see how affect differs from concreteness, despite the fact that these features may tend to co-occur in the typical case. One way to induce affect in study participants is to describe scenarios concretely, by adding details and emphasizing the features of these scenarios that are likely to evoke strong emotional responses. These sorts of cases are commonly employed in research on folk intuitions about free agency; presumably, this is at least partly because it is easier to elicit intuitions about moral responsibility in response to vignettes depicting actions that are standardly taken to be blameworthy – and these actions, of course, tend to promote emotional reactions. Despite this, it is not difficult to imagine scenarios that, while

3 I place ‘cognitive’ in scare quotes here because this term may also be used to refer broadly to any state that involves information processing, including emotional states. In the more restrictive sense at issue here, “the rough idea is that ‘cognitive’ representations are inherently neutral representations…that do not automatically trigger particular behavioral responses or dispositions, while ‘emotional’ representations do have such automatic effects, and are therefore behaviorally valenced” (Greene 2008, 40). As Greene notes, a sufficiently rigorous definition of ‘cognition’ in this more restrictive sense is difficult to find in the literature, but I trust that the general idea is clear. 4 Cf. Prinz (2004, 179–97). I take no stand here on whether ‘urges’ and ‘wants’ are distinct from desires as such. 59

concrete, are not high-affect, perhaps because they describe a morally neutral action (say, starting one’s car) in detailed, specific terms.5 And, for that matter, high-affect abstract scenarios also seem possible, if perhaps somewhat more difficult to construct.6 Accounts that explain contextual variation on the compatibility question primarily in terms of affect are, then, distinguishable both theoretically and empirically from those that explain this variation primarily in terms of the difference between abstraction and concreteness. Call the latter theories ‘abstraction accounts’. A more difficult question than those just considered concerns the proper way to characterize ‘abstraction’ and ‘concreteness’ as these notions are employed in the experimental literature. As Sinnott-Armstrong notes, “the slippery terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ can refer either to the dichotomy between universal and particular or to the separate dichotomy between general and specific (as well as to other dichotomies)” (2008, 226n1). While it is often intuitively clear whether one scenario is ‘more concrete’ than another, it would undoubtedly be helpful to have more formal depictions of abstraction and concreteness that effectively capture these intuitive differences. Unfortunately, it is probably the case (as Sinnott-Armstrong suggests) that empirical work on these issues has not yet progressed to a point at which any precise characterizations of these notions could be asserted with much confidence; nonetheless, it does seem possible to at least begin to characterize abstraction and concreteness in a way that may facilitate future discussion. As a first pass, greater concreteness seems to be associated with more detail – that is, with descriptions and other representations (including mental representations) that exclude, or are inconsistent with, a greater number of alternative interpretations or ways of ‘filling in’ these descriptions. This is, plausibly, why the concrete condition in Nichols and Knobe’s (2007) first study – in which Bill “sets up a device in his basement that burns down his house and kills his

5 Pretheoretic intuitions about morally neutral actions with respect to the compatibility question have been studied in the literature, although this is not the norm. See, for example, the discussion of the NMNT (again, short for ‘Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner’) studies in the previous chapter (Nahmias et al. 2004; 2005; 2008). I discuss the relationship between affective performance error accounts and intuitions elicited in response to neutral scenarios in greater detail below. 6 An important difficulty with developing high-affect abstract cases is that affective reactions may actually cause people to conceptualize scenarios more concretely (Weigel 2011, 810; for experimental data bearing on this point, see Fujita et al. 2006; Liberman et al. 2007). Nonetheless, it may be feasible to construct abstract cases that are affectively charged relative to other non-affective, concrete scenarios. It is unfortunate that work on folk intuitions with respect to such cases has (to my knowledge) not yet been completed, since such work would be invaluable in determining whether contextual variation derives primarily from affect or abstraction. 60

family” – is indeed concrete relative to their abstract condition, which simply asks whether “it is possible for a person to be fully morally responsible” for an action (670). The latter question is consistent with additional details that include innumerable (unspecified) persons performing innumerable (unspecified) actions, while the former description concerns a specific agent (Bill) involved with a series of specific actions and other events (Bill’s going to the basement, his setting up the device, the house burning down, Bill’s family being killed). The concrete condition thus rules out a number of possible representations with respect to other agents (say, ‘Anne,’ or ‘Frank’), other actions Bill could have performed (talking things through with his family, making a sandwich), and other ways of performing the specific actions that he did choose (burning down his house by disconnecting the gas line to the stove, killing his family by hiring an assassin). Plausibly, the elimination of these alternatives is part of what makes the concrete condition concrete. While other studies utilize more subtle manipulations with respect to abstraction, it seems to me that these manipulations also arguably rely on the elimination of alternative interpretations of a scenario (perhaps in addition to other factors) in order to induce greater concreteness in participants’ representations of actions or events. Take, for example, Roskies and Nichols (2008), whose participants read descriptions of a deterministic universe that was depicted either as ours or as a different universe much like ours. These descriptions are as follows (the main text represents the ‘actual’ condition, while bracketed text was added to the scenario in the ‘alternate’ condition):

[Imagine an alternate universe, Universe A, that is much like earth. But in Universe A,] many eminent scientists have become convinced that [in their universe,] every decision a person makes is completely caused by what happened before the decision – given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does. These scientists think that a person’s decision is always an inevitable result of their genetic makeup combined with environmental influences. So if a person decides to commit a crime, this can always be explained as a result of past influences. Any individual who had the same genetic makeup and the same environmental influences would have decided exactly the same thing. This is

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because a person’s decision is always completely caused by what happened in the past. (Roskies and Nichols 2008, 3, emphasis in original)

Roskies and Nichols found that participants in the actual condition were significantly more likely than those in the alternate condition to agree that the people described in this scenario (1) are “fully morally responsible,” (2) “should still be morally blamed,” and (3) “make truly free choices” (2008, 4–5). Given the minimal differences in description between actual and alternate conditions in this study, it may not be initially obvious how it could generate concreteness by precluding possible interpretations. It should not be overlooked, however, that the people described in the actual condition are us. Participants in this study presumably know quite a bit about the actual world – its history, its natural laws, the features of various specific events taking place within it – and it seems reasonable to think that they availed themselves of this knowledge in representing the scenario in the actual condition. Alternate condition participants, in contrast, are told only that Universe A is “much like earth”; what they are not told is precisely how, or to what extent, this universe is similar to our own. Sinnott-Armstrong notes of Universe A that its description “does not give us any concrete detail. Does my family live there? Which environmental influences affect actions in that world? How much immorality is there? Which laws are enforced? What happened in its history? In this respect, the alternate condition is much less concrete than the actual condition” (2008, 216). That such questions are to a large extent answerable in the actual condition illustrates the degree to which that condition eliminates alternative ways of ‘filling in’ details about the vignette. Thus, this study may also be manipulating concreteness by modifying the variety of alternative interpretations consistent with a given scenario. Our discussion thus far suggests that, roughly, the concreteness of a representation increases to the extent that this representation is inconsistent with alternative ways of filling in details about the object(s)7 of that representation. This strikes me as a useful initial characterization of one aspect of the abstract/concrete distinction, although I would not at this time suggest endorsing it as a complete or final account. For one, such a principle may have

7 Metaphysically inclined readers will note that ‘object’ needs to be construed broadly here so as to include events, properties, and the like. 62

trouble accounting for differences in concreteness that arise purely from universal and existential quantification. ‘All cats are mammals’ appears to eliminate more ways of filling in details than ‘this cat is a mammal’; yet the latter seems more concrete than the former.8 More importantly, this proposal may fail to capture all of the factors that can impact level of concreteness. There is now evidence that abstraction can be promoted by eliciting judgments under circumstances that involve increased temporal distance (Liberman, Sagristano, and Trope 2002; Liberman et al. 2007), increased spatial distance (Williams and Bargh 2008), decreased emotional valence (Fujita et al. 2006; Liberman et al. 2007), and focusing on general character traits as opposed to situational features (Nussbaum, Trope, and Liberman 2003), and it is not immediately clear how these differences might be accounted for in terms of increased detail.9 Despite these shortcomings, thinking of concreteness in terms of additional detail appears helpful as a general heuristic, since it does seem to capture a broad range of extant data on the topics presently at issue. I take it that the characterizations of affect and abstraction offered here, while perhaps not ideally precise, nonetheless suffice to allow an initial investigation into hypotheses that appeal to these mechanisms in explaining variation in pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question. In particular, the possibility that either increased affect or abstraction biases participants’ responses to prompts concerning this question in a manner conducive to performance errors must be considered. Only a handful of theories purporting to account for contextual variation in folk intuitions relevant to free agency are presently available in the literature.10 Of these, perhaps the most widely discussed are those developed by Nichols and Knobe (2007) and Nahmias and colleagues

8 The initial proposal offered here might be able to account for this point if existentially quantified claims invite representations of particular entities while universally quantified claims do not. (The thought would be that particular representations ‘are inconsistent with alternative ways of filling in details’ that are not precluded by general representations, since the former represents something that is (say) a particular color, shape, etc.) But this point need not be pursued here. 9 For helpful reviews of the literature just cited, see Liberman and Trope (2008) and Weigel (2011). The latter includes two original studies on contextual variation with respect to free agency; notably, the results of these studies suggest that certain aspects of this variation can be employed to enhance a tendency to compatibilist-friendly judgments in abstract contexts. Additional research on this intriguing possibility is warranted; if correct, it would provide yet another route by which the experimental literature might be shown to support DV. See section 6.1 for further discussion of these issues. 10 In addition to the works discussed in this chapter and the next, see Mandelbaum and Ripley (2012), Sinnott- Armstrong (2008), and Weigel (2011) for potential explanations of this variation. Unlike the hypotheses considered in this and the next chapter, these accounts do not attribute the contextual variability at issue here to performance errors. 63

(Nahmias 2006; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012). Both are what I have been calling performance error accounts; additionally, the former relies primarily on affect while the latter appeals largely to abstraction to explain contextual variation. Detailed investigation of each position is thus central to both (1) making good on Chapter Three’s promise to evaluate performance error hypotheses in greater detail and (2) discerning whether appeals to affect or abstraction constitute plausible explanations of differences in intuitions about free agency. Here, I summarize and consider the implications of Nichols and Knobe’s (2007) affective performance error account; Nahmias’s ‘bypassing hypothesis,’ which treats abstraction as engendering error in certain cases, is considered in the following chapter.

4.2 Affective Performance Errors

In addition to conducting some of the earliest experimental work on contextual variation in the content of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to free agency, Nichols and Knobe (2007) offer a preliminary account of this variation that appeals to affect as its source:

Our hypothesis is that, when people are confronted with a story about an agent who performs a morally bad behavior, this can trigger an immediate emotional response, and this emotional response can play a crucial role in their intuitions about whether the agent was morally responsible. In fact, people may sometimes declare such an agent to be morally responsible despite the fact that they embrace a theory of responsibility on which the agent is not responsible. (Nichols and Knobe 2007, 664)

The theory of responsibility in question here is, on Nichols and Knobe’s view, incompatibilist (664).11 (As in the previous chapter, I henceforth abbreviate ‘Nichols and Knobe’ as ‘NK.’) Their account thus suggests that in non-affective contexts folk tend to (correctly) apply this incompatibilist theory, resulting in judgments implying that moral responsibility is undermined

11 The authors note that their usage of ‘theory’ is intended to refer “loosely…to an internally represented body of information” (682n2). 64

by determinism. High-affect situations, in contrast, tend to elicit emotional responses that conflict with this incompatibilist theory, leading to moral responsibility assessments consistent with compatibilism. Much of NK’s evidence for this general model derives from their own data, as described in the previous chapter.12 In particular, while their first study provides evidence for the existence of contextual variability in folk intuitions on free agency, the second is meant to shed light on the source of this variability; as a result of the latter, NK suggest that the variation in question arises primarily from differences in affect as opposed to abstraction. The data obtained from this second study are therefore especially relevant to the present discussion, since they play an important role in NK’s defense of their preferred view. Consequently, I briefly review this study here. To distinguish affect from abstraction, the authors designed a pair of concrete vignettes that varied with respect to the level of affect they were expected to induce. Each vignette was preceded, as in NK’s study 1, by descriptions of the deterministic universe A and the indeterministic universe B. Participants then read a short scenario that varied by condition; these read as follows:

[High-affect Condition] As he has done many times in the past, Bill stalks and rapes a stranger. Is it possible that Bill is fully morally responsible for raping the stranger?

[Low-affect Condition] As he has done many times in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is it possible that Mark is fully morally responsible for cheating on his taxes? (Nichols and Knobe 2007, 675)

In each condition, half of the participants were told that the relevant agent (i.e., Bill or Mark, as appropriate) is in the deterministic Universe A, while the other half were told that he is in the indeterministic Universe B, resulting in a 2 (high-affect/low-affect) x 2 (deterministic/ indeterministic) experimental design.

12 See section 3.2. NK also cite Watson (2004) and Small and Loewenstein (2005) in support of their position. 65

100% 95% 89% 90% 80% 70% 64% 60% 50% High-Affect (Bill) 40% Low-Affect (Mark)

30% 23% 20% 10% 0% Universe B (Indeterministic) Universe A (Deterministic)

Figure 1: Nichols and Knobe (2007) study 2 results.13

Results are reported in Figure 1, with percentages indicating the proportion of participants responding that it is possible that the agent described is ‘fully morally responsible.’ Briefly, these data suggest that while participants are quite willing to hold both Bill and Mark ‘fully morally responsible’ in the indeterministic condition, in the deterministic scenarios only Bill is thought to be appropriately held to this standard. Since both vignettes are plausibly taken to be concrete, this difference appears to be difficult to explain in terms of abstraction. Consequently, NK conclude that their “overall pattern of results…suggests that affect is playing an important role in the process that generates people’s compatibilist intuitions” (676). Even if NK are entirely correct that affect is the primary source of this variation, though, an important question remains: why think that the intuitions generated by experimental participants in response to high-affect cases are primarily errors? For all that has been said to this point, it seems possible that both sets of intuitions genuinely reflect underlying competences; for example, low-affect intuitions14 may result from a competence designed to operate in unemotional or theoretical contexts, while high-affect intuitions represent the output of a competence that takes emotional states as inputs. If the ‘high-affect competence’ were to take

13 The graph reproduced in figure 1 was constructed by the present author from data reported in table 2 of Nichols and Knobe (2007). That table is © 2007, John Wiley and Sons; copyright permission for it is included here in Appendix A. Thanks to John Wiley and Sons for providing this permission. 14 ‘Low-affect intuition’ here refers simply to intuitions generated in low-affect contexts. (This does not imply that the intuition is itself somehow ‘low-affect’.) 66

precedence over the ‘low-affect competence’ when both are in operation, this would explain contextual variation in folk intuitions in affective terms – and would appear to do so without postulating error as the source of these intuitions. NK are aware of the possibility that affective reactions might promote competent responses to their scenarios; they thus distinguish between “performance error” and “affective competence” models as potential explanations of their results.15 On the latter view, “people normally make responsibility judgments by experiencing an affective reaction which, in combination with certain other processes, enables an assessment of moral responsibility” – that is, affective mechanisms play a central role in the competence that generates these assessments (672). The problem with this model, NK maintain, is that it has trouble accounting for the results of their second study; in particular, “it seems difficult to see how the affective competence account can explain why responses to the low-affect case drop precipitously in the determinist condition, since this doesn’t hold for the high-affect case” (677). They thus argue that an alternative hypothesis is needed to account for this data – even if this doesn’t mean that affect is entirely “irrelevant to the normal competence” (677).16 Consequently, NK provisionally suggest that the performance error model is preferable, since “at first glance [it] provides a better explanation of these results” (677).17 According to this performance error model, “strong affective reactions can bias and distort people’s judgments” (671):

On this view, people ordinarily make responsibility judgments by relying on a tacit theory, but when they are faced with a truly egregious violation of moral norms…they experience a strong affective reaction which makes them unable to apply the theory correctly. … [The model] suggests that people’s affective

15 They also consider additional models that might account for these results, although the two considered above are most relevant for present purposes. 16 NK note that “one option that strikes us as quite plausible is a hybrid account on which (i) our normal competence with responsibility attribution does depend on affective systems, but (ii) affect also generates a bias leading to compatibilist responses in our experiments” (677). 17 I want to stress here that NK’s support for their performance error account is tentative. They hold that “although our experiment provides some reason to favor the performance error account of the compatibilist responses we found…deciding between the affective performance error and the affective competence models of compatibilist responses is not the sort of the issue that will be resolved by a single crucial experiment,” and that “we don’t yet have the data we need to decide between these competing models” (677, 678). Despite these caveats, the theory has generated enough discussion in the literature to warrant inclusion here as a potential account of folk intuitions. 67

reactions are interfering with the normal operation of the performance systems. (Nichols and Knobe 2007, 671)

As NK note, this account derives some support from studies indicating that “under the influence of affective or motivational biases, people are less likely to recall certain kinds of relevant information, less likely to believe unwanted evidence, and less likely to use critical resources to attack conclusions that are motivationally neutral” (671).18 Additionally, their theory is consistent with results indicating that judgments about the appropriate severity of a punishment can be affected by priming negative affect, even when the causes of this affect are unrelated to any factors bearing on the punishment (see especially Lerner, Goldberg, and Tetlock 1998). Most importantly, though, the affective performance error hypothesis readily explains NK’s study 2 results. It does this by implying that the low-affect condition reflects the operation of a genuine competence with respect to responsibility attribution; in the high-affect condition, in contrast, affect interferes with this operation, resulting in judgments that fail to track participants’ tacit theories of moral responsibility. Since most responses in the low-affect condition are consistent with incompatibilism, the incompatibilist’s view represents the correct account of genuine (i.e. non-error-ridden) folk intuitions on moral responsibility; “compatibilist intuitions,” in contrast, “are a product of the distorting effects of emotion and motivation” (678). If correct, this account would imply that genuine folk intuitions about moral responsibility – and, by extension, free agency19 – are best captured by descriptive invariantism (DIV). This, in turn, would generate obvious problems for the variantist position advocated in the preceding chapter.

4.3 Evaluating the Affective Performance Error Hypothesis

Recall the account defended in Chapter Three:

[DV] A significant number of pretheoretic beliefs relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism. Moreover, a significant

18 NK cite Kunda (1990) as evidence for these claims. 19 While the affective performance error hypothesis, and the data to which it pertains, directly concern only moral responsibility, I have noted previously that data of this type can generally be replicated with respect to free will (see section 3.3). The view presently under discussion thus readily generalizes to the latter domain. 68

number of pretheoretic beliefs relevant to free willS imply that free will in this sense is not compatible with determinism.

(Free willS, again, is free will “in the most theoretically powerful sense necessary for the most interpersonally demanding type of moral responsibility that plays a significant role in actual pretheoretic responsibility practices.”) Clearly, NK’s account would, if correct, provide an alternative explanation for much of the data cited above in support of DV; additionally, their position has been carefully defended and supported with experimental evidence. For these reasons, it is important to provide a detailed evaluation of NK’s hypothesis. This is the goal of the present section. Before embarking on this project, however, the time has come for me to lay some cards on the table. First, a concession: nothing I say in what follows shows that affect never biases intuitions about free agency. In fact, I find it quite plausible that the hypothesis considered here does indeed explain some contextual variation with respect to the compatibility issue. I will, however, provide some reasons to think that it does not explain as much of this variation as one might think; thus, my goal here is not so much to falsify NK’s account as it is to suggest that its scope may be more narrow than previously envisioned. Moreover – and this is the trump card – it should be kept in mind throughout this discussion that even if this account was entirely correct, DV would still be true. Suppose that NK are right to think that affect engenders bias, and that intuitions generated in response to high- affect scenarios should therefore be regarded with suspicion. Even if this is so, it remains the case that 23% of participants in the low-affect tax cheat case discussed above held that Mark is ‘fully morally responsible’ for cheating on his taxes; additionally, 14% said this in the abstract condition of their first study, where there wasn’t even a specific agent to blame. If these numbers are representative, then roughly 15% – 20% of people have, in some circumstances, compatibilist intuitions that are not the product of affective bias. These numbers alone, in my view, may well be sufficient to warrant acceptance of DV.20 Thus, NK’s account appears to be consistent with the defense of descriptive variantism provided above.

20 See section 2.3 on this point. There, I suggested that percentages of roughly this size could well constitute ‘significant’ commitments, in the sense in which this term is employed in DV and other descriptive hypotheses. 69

Nonetheless, this account does weaken DV to the extent that it erodes the evidential basis for this position. The ensuing challenges to NK’s view are thus best understood as attempts to protect DV against this erosion. In this regard, a number of considerations suggest that the explanatory powers of this view, while perhaps capturing some of the judgments appealed to above in support of DV, are too limited to effectively undermine any significant portion of the data cited in my arguments for this position. First, NK’s account appears unable to explain contextual variation generated with respect to low-affect contexts. Although experimental work on free agency to date has largely focused on cases likely to induce affective reactions, several studies offer evidence that contextual variation persists in the absence of affect, as other authors have noted (e.g. Sinnott-Armstrong 2008; Nahmias and Murray 2011). NMNT, for example, found that most participants (79%) were willing to say that an agent goes jogging “of his own free will” even when this act was predictable with certainty on the basis of past events and natural laws (2005, 567; 2008, 87). They also obtained similar responses with respect to vignettes describing agents deterministically caused to either keep or return a wallet containing $1000 (2005, 570; 2008, 89) and to steal a necklace (2008, 88).21 Moreover, a scenario very similar to the latter case was explicitly found to be susceptible to contextual variation, as discussed in the ensuing chapter (Nahmias and Murray 2011).22 Keeping wallets and stealing necklaces, while perhaps blameworthy, hardly seem likely to elicit overwhelming emotional reactions. Explaining these results in terms of affect – especially those that involve neutral and praiseworthy actions – thus seems difficult, to say the least. Additionally, recent experimental results obtained by Florian Cova and colleagues (2012) raise some difficulties for interpreting NK’s own results in terms of affective performance errors. They gave versions of both NK’s high-affect case from their first study and NMNT’s ‘supercomputer’ vignette23 to patients exhibiting a behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a disorder characterized by “emotional blunting…patients suffer from impairment in social cognition and emotional processing, in particular during theory of mind or emotional

21 Specifically, 76% agreed that the agents in question either kept or returned the wallet of their own free will, while 60% found keeping it to be blameworthy and 64% held returning it to be praiseworthy. Similarly, 66% agreed that stealing the necklace involved free will, and 77% found this action to be blameworthy. 22 This study is considered in greater detail in section 5.1. 23 Both of these cases are reviewed in the previous chapter; see sections 3.2 and 3.1 respectively. 70

identification tests” (Cova et al. 2012, 7).24 Since, on their view, performance errors are generated when affective reactions interfere with the application of one’s (incompatibilist) theory, NK’s hypothesis appears to predict that participants with emotional impairments, who exhibit a diminished capacity for such reactions, will be able to apply their theory correctly and should thus respond to high-affect cases in a more characteristically incompatibilist manner. This, however, is not what Cova and colleagues found: the responses of bvFTD patients were statistically no different (for either scenario) from those of controls; as usual, intuitions concerning these cases were largely conducive to compatibilism. The authors conclude that “contra Nichols and Knobe’s ‘performance error model’…emotional reactions do not play a key role in generating compatibilist answers” (2012, 13, emphasis in original). While these data are intriguing, it seems to me that some caution is warranted in drawing conclusions about the affective performance error hypothesis on this basis. This is primarily because individuals with emotional deficits – including bvFTD, the same disorder as that studied here – have been found to make moral judgments that are more strongly consequentialist relative to unimpaired participants, who often respond in more characteristically deontological ways (Mendez, Anderson, and Shapira 2005; Ciaramelli et al. 2007; Koenigs et al. 2007).25 As is well known among philosophers, consequentialism’s emphasis on the more pragmatic dimensions of moral responsibility makes it especially well-suited for compatibilist treatments (see, for example, Smart 1961; Arneson 2003; Vargas 2013, esp. Ch. 7). It seems at least possible, then, that bvFTD patients attribute moral responsibility in response to high-affect scenarios because they (perhaps inchoately) judge that, as a practical matter, it is important to preserve blaming and punishment practices – in short, their consequentialist inclinations underwrite their compatibilist-friendly responses. It is open to NK to preserve the affective performance error hypothesis by appealing to this possibility, unless and until it is eliminated by future

24 All bvFTD patients (N = 12) and controls (10 patients with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and 10 non- symptomatic subjects) received NK’s case first and NMNT’s second. The study used shortened versions of both vignettes translated into French; however, a preliminary experiment eliciting judgments about these variations from unimpaired participants revealed results similar to those obtained in the original studies. 25 The first study cited here, in particular, found evidence of this difference in consequentialist judgments specifically for bvFTD patients as opposed to other types of emotional disorder. For additional data on, and discussion of, the neurological mechanisms underpinning consequentialist and deontological judgments in typical individuals, see especially the work of Joshua Greene and colleagues (e.g., Greene et al. 2001; Greene and Haidt 2002; Greene et al. 2004; Greene 2008). 71

experimental work.26 Thus, Cova and colleagues’ data alone does not suffice to undermine NK’s hypothesis. It does, however, remain suggestive, particularly in conjunction with the additional considerations discussed here. Further issues concerning NK’s interpretation of their original data may be raised with respect to their experimental design, as discussed by Sinnott-Armstrong (2008). Recall that NK’s primary evidence for affect (rather than abstraction) as the mechanism driving contextual variation is provided by their second study, which attempted to control for concreteness while varying affect. This study contrasted intuitions about Mark, who ‘arranges to cheat on his taxes’, with those concerning Bill, who ‘stalks and rapes a stranger’. Sinnott-Armstrong aptly notes that these descriptions arguably fail to hold concreteness constant:

[Mark] only “arranges to cheat on his taxes.” I am not sure exactly what this means, but it seems less concrete than actually cheating on taxes. Moreover…there are many very different ways to cheat on taxes, and many subjects might not have any concrete ideas about how to cheat on taxes (especially among college students…). In contrast, when the story says, “Bill stalks and rapes a stranger,” stalking rules out date rape, marital rape, and so on. Hence, this description conjures up more concrete images. Thus, at least some of the difference between the cases of Mark the tax cheater and Bill the rapist might be due to concreteness instead of affect. (Sinnott-Armstrong 2008, 215)

In my view, Sinnott-Armstrong is absolutely right to point out this possibility. If NK’s high- affect condition is also more concrete than their low-affect condition, then at least some of the differences in intuitions elicited by this study may not be due to affect (and, a fortiori, to affective performance errors) after all. Additional differences between intuitions about Mark and Bill might be explained by appealing to potential interpretations of the phrase ‘fully morally responsible’. On one plausible

26 One possibility here would involve eliciting bvFTD patients’ reactions to NK’s abstract scenarios. (Unfortunately, Cova and colleagues did not test these cases.) If consequentialist inclinations play a role in these patients’ judgments of concrete cases, they should also be a factor in abstract judgments; thus, this hypothesis predicts that bvFTD patients, unlike unimpaired participants, should also judge the latter cases in a predominantly compatibilist-friendly manner. If this prediction were disconfirmed, it would lend additional support to Cova and colleagues’ interpretation of their results. 72

understanding, being fully morally responsible for something involves being subject to a very high degree of blame and/or punishment for that thing. If this is how NK’s participants understood this phrase, then it is not surprising that they were less likely to hold Mark to this standard. After all, cheating on taxes may be a moral infraction, but it is hardly as serious as rape. Perhaps, then, this difference underlies further differences in reactions to Mark’s case as opposed to Bill’s. One might wonder, if NK’s participants did indeed understand the phrase ‘fully morally responsible’ in this way, why respondents in the non-deterministic low-affect condition were so willing to ascribe full moral responsibility to Mark – after all, 89% of them did so. I agree that this point would be problematic if this reading of NK’s questions was supposed to explain all of the variation between participants’ responses in the deterministic conditions. But this is not what I have in mind. Again, my goal here is not to show that affective performance errors never occur, but only to suggest that they occur less often than NK’s hypothesis might lead one to think. To that end, I find it plausible that this reading of ‘fully morally responsible’ explains some – not all – of the difference in participants’ intuitions about Bill and Mark. In support of this claim, note that there was a small (and presumably non-significant) – difference in participants’ willingness to ascribe full moral responsibility to Bill as opposed to Mark in the indeterministic conditions, and differences in interpretations of ‘fully morally responsible’ may explain some of this difference.27 In conjunction with the other factors considered here, then, it seems plausible that the amount of variance in intuitions that is based in affective performance errors may be less than advertised. The final concerns regarding NK’s account that I discuss here are, in some ways, the most important, since they call into question their interpretation of any affectively driven responses that remain when the foregoing worries have been taken into account. These concerns cluster around the following point: it is unclear why affect should be thought to be a source of error in the first place.28 That is, why should we think that pretheoretic intuitions generated in response to emotion-inducing vignettes are often mistakes? NK rely largely on two

27 NK do not report the results of statistical analysis concerning the contrast between high- and low-affect indeterministic cases. They do, however, report that differences between both high-affect cases, both low-affect cases, and high- and low-affect deterministic cases were all statistically significant (683n12). I thus assume that the results of analysis on the contrast presently at issue were not reported because these results failed to achieve significance. (Note that if I am wrong about this it would actually be another point in favor of the explanation considered here.) 28 Cf., again, Sinnott-Armstrong: “it is not clear…why emotions should be associated with errors” (2008, 213). 73

considerations to explain their position here. First, they note that affect has been found to induce error – or at least introduce bias – in other domains, e.g. with respect to critical reasoning. Second, they contend that treating high-affect intuitions as reflecting a competence leaves one unable to explain, with respect to their second study, “why responses to the low-affect case drop precipitously in the determinist condition, since this doesn’t hold for the high-affect case” (Nichols and Knobe 2007, 677). Ultimately, though, these points seem to be a thin basis on which to rest the affective performance error account. While I certainly would not dispute NK’s claim that affect tends to promote error in certain domains, it should be noted that with respect to a variety of other areas it is plausibly taken to underpin competences. These latter include perception and attention (Dolan 2002), memory and learning (Dolan 2002; Richards and Gross 2000), social interaction (Piguet et al. 2011; Lough et al. 2006), and – most importantly, and as NK are aware – moral judgment, a domain closely related to the topic presently under discussion (Haidt 2001; Greene and Haidt 2002; Nichols 2004; J. Prinz 2007). Consequently, the question of whether the influence of affect in other domains suggests that it leads to error in the present context appears to be at best a toss-up; if so, then NK cannot claim victory for their account on this basis. With respect to NK’s second study, I have already suggested a few potential explanations of their results that do not involve appealing to affectively-based performance errors. For one, the high-affect condition may be more concrete than the low-affect condition; for another, one reading of ‘fully morally responsible’ supports the view that this notion applies to Bill but not to Mark. Nonetheless, let’s shift the burden of proof for a moment. What explanations have NK given for their thought that it’s a mistake to hold Bill fully morally responsible for his act of rape? Why not think that the real error, if there is one, occurs when participants fail to hold Mark responsible? NK consider this possibility (on behalf of the ‘affective competence’ account), but worry that “it would take significant work to show that such everyday cases of apparent responsibility attribution [as Mark’s] don’t really count as cases in which we exercise our competence at responsibility attribution” (2007, 118). But it’s not clear, at least to me, that Mark’s case is all that ‘everyday’ to begin with. Speaking (admittedly, only) from personal experience, I can think of just a handful of times that I’ve been called on to pass moral judgment on people who have cheated on their taxes, and virtually all of those involved high affect (e.g. businesspeople who

74

become famous for failing to pay several million dollars owed to the government). In contrast, discussion of rape and other serious crimes in the news is not exactly uncommon. In fact, it seems to me that a plausible case might be made to the effect that ‘everyday’ cases of responsibility attribution often involve quite a bit of affect, since such attributions are commonly made in response to highly personal, emotionally charged situations – being lied to, cheated on, etc. If this is right, it suggests that Bill’s case is no more abnormal than Mark’s with respect to the affective response it generates, and thus that we have no more reason to find the former case conducive to error than the latter. NK might suggest that Mark’s case is less likely to be the product of error because it accords with the majority of intuitions evoked in the abstract scenario utilized in their first study. Their hypothesis, recall, suggests that (many) folk have an incompatibilist theory of responsibility; this theory can be brought out in abstract (and low-affect) contexts and supports the view that Mark is not morally responsible in the deterministic scenario. Failure to attribute responsibility to Mark in this case, then, may reflect a correct application of participants’ underlying theories. Again, however, it is unclear why folk intuitions elicited by abstract or low-affect contexts should take precedence over other intuitions. As Nahmias and Murray (2011, 199) note, it is standard practice in philosophy to support one’s view by constructing thought experiments – concrete scenarios that, it is hoped, evoke intuitions in accord with one’s preferred analysis. Presumably, this practice obtains because reactions to concrete cases are thought to get at something important about one’s understanding of a given phenomenon, and intuitions about them are, in general, taken to be at least as reliable as judgments made on the basis of purely theoretical considerations. Similarly, Mele notes that “although I doubt that common-sense theories about philosophical issues are likely to be much more successful than common-sense theories about topics in physics, economics, or psychology, I believe that we have good reason to take seriously common-sense judgments” about particular cases (2001, 27, emphasis in original).29 Although I suspect that Mele and NK are using the term ‘theory’ in slightly different senses (on NK’s usage, a ‘theory’ is merely an ‘internally represented body of information’), the broader point remains – folk intuitions formed in response to concrete scenarios should be taken at least as seriously as those generated in abstract contexts.

29 See also Mele (2003, 333). 75

In light of the foregoing considerations, it seems plausible to think that affective performance errors are responsible for only a small amount of the contextual variation cited above in support of DV. Again, though, I want to emphasize that I am not saying such errors never occur; in fact, I would find it surprising if strong desires to hold Bill accountable did not lead some participants in NK’s study to overlook contravening considerations that might have led them to opposing judgments. In fact, NK may not entirely disagree with the conclusions drawn here, since they note that one view they find “especially plausible” treats affect “both as part of the fundamental competence underlying responsibility judgments and as a factor that can sometimes lead to performance errors” (2011, 674, emphasis in original). Here, I am inclined to agree with NK that a ‘hybrid account’ of this type may well be correct. What I have suggested above is not that NK’s affective performance error account explains none of the data on contextual variation, but that it explains less of this data than NK’s discussion appears to suggest. In particular, when alternative methods of accounting for these data are taken into consideration, robust variation in pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question appears to remain. I conclude, on the basis of the preceding considerations, that NK’s affective performance error hypothesis does not represent a serious challenge to DV. It remains possible, however, that abstraction rather than affect tends to lead folk judgments astray in a manner that challenges this thesis; it is to this possibility that I now turn.

76

CHAPTER FIVE:

ABSTRACT PERFORMANCE ERRORS

This chapter continues to examine the possibility that many of the pretheoretic judgments cited above in support of descriptive variantism (DV) are impacted by performance errors.1 In contrast to the previous chapter, though, my focus here is on the possibility that abstraction, rather than affect, leads intuitions astray.2 The most prominent theory of this type is the ‘bypassing hypothesis’ developed by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues (Nahmias 2006; Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran 2007; Nahmias 2011; Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012). On the most recent formulation of this hypothesis, judgments that appear to favor incompatibilism commonly result when participants “conflate” or “confuse” determinism with the thesis that some key aspect(s) of agency is (are) “bypassed” in experimental scenarios (Murray and Nahmias 2012, 16). Since abstract contexts are, as noted above, especially apt to engender judgments apparently conducive to incompatibilism, the view has special significance for these contexts. Here, I evaluate the bypassing hypothesis and conclude that, like the affective performance error theory considered in the previous chapter, this hypothesis fails to undermine my claim that DV best captures extant data on pretheoretic intuitions about free agency. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first of these gives an overview of the bypassing hypothesis, while the second and third develop a pair of critiques of this hypothesis. In section two, I show that bypassing judgments3 arguably reflect underlying genuine4 concerns about free agency and related notions, which suggests that such judgments are not best treated as performance errors in any straightforward sense. Section three argues that, in many cases, the relationship between free agency intuitions and bypassing intuitions may not be such as to allow the latter to undermine the former. Thus, folk judgments pertaining to the compatibility question

1 See section 2.3 for my formulation of DV and related hypotheses. 2 This chapter assumes some familiarity with the nature of abstraction; see section 4.1 for discussion of this issue. 3 Throughout this chapter, the phrases ‘bypassing judgments’ and ‘bypassing intuitions’ refer to judgments and intuitions that bypassing is occurring with respect to some agent or scenario, unless otherwise indicated. (I occasionally distinguish between ‘pro-bypassing’ and ‘anti-bypassing’ judgments and intuitions; it is, I hope, made clear in the text when this is the case.) 4 Recall again that in section 2.1 ‘genuine’ mental states were stipulatively defined to be those that reflect folk competence(s) – in this case, the competence(s) relevant to notions of free will and moral responsibility. 77

might be genuine even if judgments pertaining to bypassing are subject to systematic error. If either of these criticisms is successful, then the bypassing hypothesis may well fail to present a significant challenge to DV; if both are, then the case for this conclusion is further strengthened.

5.1 The Bypassing Hypothesis

In explicating and evaluating the bypassing hypothesis, I focus on the work of Nahmias and his colleague Dylan Murray (Nahmias and Murray 2011; Murray and Nahmias 2012), as these works constitute the most recent, detailed, and direct defenses of the bypassing hypothesis presently available.5 Nahmias and Murray (henceforth NM)6 argue that “when ordinary people take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility, they usually do so because they misinterpret what determinism involves” (2011, 190, emphasis in original). Specifically, experimental participants often mistakenly take determinism to imply ‘bypassing,’ which occurs when “one’s actions are produced in a way that bypasses the abilities compatibilists typically identify with free will, such as rational deliberation, conscious consideration of beliefs and desires, formation of higher-order volitions, planning, self-control, and the like” (2011, 192).7 While a variety of considerations might conflict with these abilities, NM highlight fatalism (the view that everything that happens necessarily happens) and epiphenomenalism (the view that mental states, or a significant class thereof, have no physical causal effects)8 as especially salient manifestations of bypassing. The problem, of course, is that determinism does not entail bypassing. The former, recall, is the thesis that a complete description of the state of the world at any time t, in conjunction with a complete statement of the laws of nature, entails all true statements about any

5 While I lack the space to discuss them in detail, readers are encouraged to consult the other works cited in the introduction above for additional discussion of the bypassing hypothesis. 6 I use “NM” to discuss both Nahmias and Murray (2011) and Murray and Nahmias (2012), since the two papers are closely related. In the case of direct quotes, citations will clarify which paper is at issue. 7 Note that incompatibilists also typically hold that some (perhaps proper) subset of these abilities is necessary for free will. (Of course, incompatibilists add at least one further requirement – namely, the falsity of determinism.) 8 There are various ways to characterize epiphenomenalism about mental states in the literature, but the above formulation will suffice for present purposes. For discussion of a limited epiphenomenalism (which its author no longer endorses), see Jackson (1982). Wegner’s (2002; 2004; 2008) thesis of ‘apparent mental causation’ is also commonly interpreted as epiphenomenalist in some respects. (See, for example, Nahmias (2002) and Mele (2009, esp. 145–8); the latter in particular provides a concise discussion of the sense in which Wegner’s ‘epiphenomenalism’ is distinct from philosophical epiphenomenalism as such.) 78

future time.9 While this thesis does imply that, necessarily, the actual past and laws are consistent with at most one future, it entails neither the (very strong) fatalistic claim that propositions describing these events are necessarily true (since a different past or laws could have resulted in different later events),10 nor that any mental states are epiphenomenal (since such states might be integral parts of the deterministic causal chains resulting in human behavior). Moreover, the agential abilities at issue are those identified by compatibilists as central to free will, and many incompatibilists agree that determinism poses no threat to their existence.11 Thus, it seems clearly mistaken to think that determinism alone implies bypassing. (Since NM and I agree on this point, in what follows I grant it for argumentative purposes.) According to NM, though, experimental participants often make just this sort of mistake:

Our hypothesis is that many people who appear to have incompatibilist intuitions are interpreting determinism to entail…“bypassing,” and they take bypassing to preclude FW [free will] and MR [moral responsibility]. While bypassing does preclude FW and MR, determinism does not entail bypassing. So, if the reason people seem to express incompatibilist intuitions is that they mistakenly take determinism to entail bypassing, then those intuitions are not genuine incompatibilist intuitions, and do not in fact support the conclusion that determinism, properly understood, is incompatible with free will. (2011, 191–2, emphasis in original)

Adapting NM’s terminology a bit, call intuitions that seem to be conducive to incompatibilism ‘prima facie’ incompatibilist intuitions; intuitions that are prima facie, but not genuinely, so

9 See section 1.1. 10 This distinction can be expressed as follows (where ‘past’ abbreviates a complete description of the state of the world at some past time, ‘laws’ abbreviates the conjunction of propositions expressing the totality of the natural laws, and ‘P’ represents a proposition describing the occurrence of a present event): determinism implies that □[(past & laws)⊃P], while fatalism implies that □P. Note that the former would entail the latter if ‘past’ and ‘laws’ were themselves necessary truths, but determinism does not imply these further claims. 11 There are probably exceptions to this generalization: some philosophers, for example, hold that determinism is incompatible with agency (e.g., Geach 2000; Alvarez 2009; Steward 2008; 2009; 2011), which might suggest that it is also incompatible with some or all of the abilities at issue here. (For arguments against the claim that determinism precludes agency, including some discussion of the work of Alvarez and Steward in particular, see Capes (2012).) It is certainly fair to say, though, that the characterization given above is true of most incompatibilists. 79

conducive are ‘apparent’ incompatibilist intuitions.12 (Thus, prima facie incompatibilist intuitions may or may not be genuine, but apparent incompatibilist intuitions, by definition, are not.) If NM are right that most prima facie incompatibilist intuitions are merely apparent, then much of the experimental evidence favoring an incompatibilist strand of pretheoretic thought, including that cited in previous chapters, results from performance errors. (In fact, NM describe their account as “an ‘error theory’ for incompatibilist intuitions” (2011, 190).) The bypassing hypothesis therefore poses a clear challenge to the defense of DV articulated earlier. In order to test the bypassing hypothesis, NM conducted two studies that, together, provide strong initial evidence favoring their view.13 The first of these presented participants with either an abstract or concrete version of a vignette derived from either Nichols and Knobe (2007) – again, NK – or Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2004; 2005; 2008) – NMNT. Both versions of the NK scenario replicated verbatim the language used by these authors in their original study. (Recall that this study contrasted intuitions about whether it is possible for a person to be ‘fully morally responsible’ in a deterministic universe with intuitions about whether Bill, a specific agent in this universe who kills his family, is fully morally responsible.14) The concrete version of the NMNT case read as follows:

Imagine there is a universe (Universe C) that is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature. In this universe the same initial conditions and the same laws of nature cause the exact same events for the entire history of the universe, so that every time the universe is re-created, everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time and then steals it, and every time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time and then does it. (Nahmias and Murray 2011, 195, emphasis in original)

12 NM (2011) employ the phrase ‘prima facie intuition’ primarily to refer to intuitions that favor compatibilism, or at least fail to favor incompatibilism. (Some intuitions, they note, could fail to favor incompatibilism without having positive compatibilist content.) Their use of ‘apparent incompatibilist intuition’ seems at times to conform to the use of this phrase stipulated above, while at other times it seems to imply something more like what I call here a ‘prima facie’ incompatibilist intuition. 13 Murray and Nahmias (2012) describe the results of both studies; the first is described in somewhat greater detail in Nahmias and Murray (2011). Below, I draw from both discussions in outlining the relevant evidence. 14 See section 3.2 for additional details on this study. 80

In the NMNT abstract condition, the last sentence of this scenario was replaced with the following language: “For instance, in this universe whenever a person decides to do something, every time the universe is re-created, that person decides to do the same thing at that time and then does it” (2011, 201, emphasis in original). The key difference between the present study and previous work lies in the questions experimental participants were asked after reading these scenarios. Participants responded to standard questions about whether people (or, in the concrete conditions, Bill or Jill) can be “fully morally responsible” for what they do, whether such people “have free will,” and whether a person can deserve blame in the universes described (2011, 201–2). However, they were also asked additional questions designed to reveal the extent to which they took these scenarios to involve bypassing. To this end, participants reported their level of agreement (on 6-point scales) with the following ‘bypassing statements,’ presented here in the form used in the abstract conditions:

1. In Universe [A/C], a person’s decisions have no effect on what they end up being caused to do. 2. In Universe [A/C], what a person wants has no effect on what they end up being caused to do. 3. In Universe [A/C], what a person believes has no effect on what they end up being caused to do. 4. In Universe [A/C], a person has no control over what they do. (Nahmias and Murray 2011, 202)

Participants in the study’s concrete conditions received analogous questions about Bill or Jill, as appropriate. (The order of all questions was randomized, with the exception of the moral responsibility question, which was always presented first; this exception was made in order to replicate the format employed by NK (2007).) Participants’ scores on the responses to each of these four queries were then averaged to generate a ‘Bypassing composite score’; ‘MR/FW composite scores’ were likewise calculated by averaging responses to free will and moral responsibility questions.

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(As I refer to these composite scores frequently in what follows, I henceforth adopt some stylistic distinctions to simplify discussion. Following NM, I often abbreviate ‘free will’ as ‘FW’ and ‘moral responsibility’ as ‘MR.’ I also refer to such things as ‘FW/MR judgments’; when doing so, I use the order FW/MR to distinguish general discussion of these judgments from specific references to NM’s composite scores, which are always labeled using the reverse order MR/FW. Similarly, discussion of NM’s ‘Bypassing’ composite scores can be distinguished from discussion of ‘bypassing’ judgments in general by the capitalization employed in references to the former.) Several facets of the data obtained from this study warrant mention here. First, the (by now familiar) difference between abstract and concrete contexts found in previous work was replicated in this study, with MR/FW scores being significantly higher in concrete conditions relative to abstract conditions. Bypassing scores, in contrast, displayed the inverse relationship to abstraction (that is, lower in concrete conditions relative to abstract conditions). As might be expected, given these relationships, MR/FW and Bypassing scores were also significantly inversely correlated with each other, both within each experimental condition and across all four conditions as a whole. Finally, the majority of participants with scores reflecting prima facie incompatibilist intuitions (i.e. MR/FW scores below the 3.5 midpoint) also received above average (greater than 3.5) bypassing scores, while most participants responding in what we might call a “prima facie compatibilist” manner (MR/FW scores above 3.5) scored below average (i.e. below 3.5) for Bypassing. More specifically, the percentage of prima facie incompatibilists who were also pro- bypassers ranged from 67% (in the NK concrete condition) to 100% (in the NMNT concrete condition), whereas the proportion of prima facie compatibilists offering anti-bypassing judgments varied between 72% (in NK abstract) and 85% (in NMNT abstract).15 Thus, NM’s data show very strong statistical connections between pro-bypassing judgments and prima facie incompatibilist intuitions and, correspondingly, between anti-bypassing judgments and prima facie compatibilist responses. In short: most prima facie incompatibilists endorsed the bypassing statements, and most prima facie compatibilists did not.

15 For precise figures regarding these percentages in each condition, see NM (2011, 204). Also, note that throughout this chapter, where discussion of scores above or below the midpoint is concerned, I follow NM in excluding any participants obtaining scores equal to this midpoint. 82

M (Mediating Variable)

a b

c X Y (Initial Variable) (Outcome Variable)

Figure 2: The form of mediation analysis.

While these data strongly suggest the presence of a relationship between bypassing judgments and FW/MR judgments, they do not yet shed much light on the specific nature of this relationship. In particular, NM note, they “raise a more important question: are the two composite scores merely correlated, or does interpreting a scenario to involve bypassing cause participants to judge that agents in it lack moral responsibility and free will?” (2012, 15, emphasis in original). To address this question, the authors conducted a mediation analysis on the composite scores obtained in the abstract conditions.16 These analyses “involve the specification of a causal model between three variables and the strengths of the paths between them using multiple regression” (2012, 15); that is, they provide statistical tests of the hypothesis that a causal relationship between two variables proceeds via an intervening or mediating variable (Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger 1998, 259).17 The general form of mediation is depicted in Figure 2. There, an observed causal relation between the initial variable X and outcome variable Y (represented by the solid arrow labeled ‘c’) is hypothesized to result at least partly from the causal effects of X on the proposed mediator M and the subsequent causal impact of M on Y (represented by the dashed arrows labeled ‘a’ and ‘b’ respectively). Mediation analysis evaluates this hypothesis by assessing the extent to

16 NM note that concrete conditions were not included in this analysis because these conditions varied affectively; consequently, including them “would have introduced a confounding variable” – namely, level of affect (2012, n18). 17 See also Baron and Kenny (1986), MacKinnon et al. (2002), and MacKinnon, Fairchild, and Fritz (2007). 83

which the strength of path c is reduced when controlling for M. Such a reduction, if found, suggests that the causal relationship between X and Y does indeed obtain at least partly in virtue of the hypothesized causal chain passing through M. One implication of this, of course, is that M is itself a cause of the observed changes in Y. In this case, NM tested the hypothesis that Bypassing scores acted as a mediating variable with respect to the causal relationship between the description given in a scenario (the initial variable) and resulting MR/FW scores (the outcome variable). The results of this test support their hypothesis: analysis of paths a and b yielded a statistically significant effect of scenario description on Bypassing score (path a) and Bypassing score on MR/FW score (path b), and path c was reduced to non-significance after controlling for the impact of Bypassing.18 In short, “which survey participants read…had no significant causal effect on their MR/FW responses over and above the effect it had in virtue of causing different interpretations of whether the scenario involved bypassing” (2011, 206, emphasis in original). According to NM, this result suggests two causal hypotheses. The first is intrapersonal; NM hold that “the most plausible interpretation” of the relationship between an individual participant’s pro-bypassing judgments and her anti-FW/MR judgments is that taking “determinism to entail bypassing…generally causes [people] to judge that determinism precludes MR and FW” (2011, 207, emphasis in original). In short, bypassing judgments tend to cause prima facie incompatibilist intuitions. The second is interpersonal: “rather than having context- variant intuitions about free will or its relation to determinism (or bypassing), people may simply differ in whether they interpret a description of determinism to involve bypassing, a difference which then causes different responses about agents’ free will and responsibility” (2012, 16). That is, the contextual differences appealed to above to support DV may in fact result from variance in bypassing intuitions, rather than free agency intuitions. If so, then these differences might well be irrelevant to the compatibility question (since determinism, again, does not entail bypassing). This, in turn, would be clearly problematic for the defense of DV provided earlier. The authors’ second study sheds some additional light on these intriguing claims. In this follow-up experiment, NM sought to investigate the content of FW/MR judgments unaccompanied by pro-bypassing intuitions. To that end, each case used in their first study was

18 Specifically, the authors report standardized regression coefficients of –.20 for path a, –.74 for path b, and only .11 for path c (2011, 206). 84

modified to explicitly state that it did not involve bypassing. All participants were given both abstract and concrete versions of either NK’s or NMNT’s cases (with the abstract scenario always first). The last paragraph of NK abstract was adjusted to read:

The key difference, then, is that in Universe A every decision is completely caused by what happened before the decision. This does not mean that in Universe A people’s mental states (their beliefs, desires, and decisions) have no effect on what they end up doing, and it does not mean that people are not part of the causal chains that lead to their actions. Rather, people’s mental states are part of the causal chains that lead to their actions, though their mental states are always completely caused by earlier things in the causal chain that happened before them – given that the past happened the way it did, each decision has to happen the way it does. By contrast, in Universe B, decisions are not completely caused by the past, and each human decision does not have to happen the way that it does given what happened in the past. (2012, 18, emphasis in original)

NMNT abstract was modified to end with largely identical language (with ‘Universe C’ replacing ‘Universe A’ as appropriate). Participants answered several questions about these cases, including the MR/FW and Bypassing questions noted above and an additional ‘modal question’ designed to discern whether they correctly understood the deterministic implications of the cases.19 They then read the following concrete case and responded to similar questions regarding it:

In Universe [A/C], a man named Bill has become attracted to his co-worker and decided that the best way to impress her is to give her an expensive necklace. Bill knows he cannot afford to buy the necklace he wants to give her, but believes he can get away with stealing it from a jewelry store near his home. At a particular time one day (time T), Bill decides to enter the store and steal the necklace and he then does so. (2012, 19)

19 The exact phrasing of the ‘modal question’ varied across cases. The scenarios and bypassing statements also incorporated other minor changes that will not concern us here. 85

100%

90% 82% 81% 80% 71% 72% Study 1 70% 66% 63% Study 2 60% 50% 49% 52% 49% 50% 37% 40% 35% 27% 29% 30% 25% 20% 12% 10% 0% MR/FW Bypassing MR/FW Bypassing MR/FW Bypassing MR/FW Bypassing NK Abstract NK Concrete NMNT Abstract NMNT Concrete

Figure 3: MR/FW and Bypassing scores in Murray and Nahmias’s studies 1 and 2.20

The results of this study replicated a number of the findings presented above. Again, MR/FW and Bypassing scores were strongly inversely correlated, and mediation analysis indicated that the relationship between scenario description and MR/FW score was mediated by Bypassing. (NM note, though, that the latter result was only marginally significant (2012, n26).) Moreover, the scenario modifications had the predicted effect: analysis of the abstract conditions in both studies revealed that Bypassing scores were significantly lower, and MR/FW scores significantly higher, in the second study relative to the first.21 These differences, along with corresponding data for the concrete conditions, are reflected in Figure 3, where percentages indicate the proportion of respondents in each study whose composite scores were above the 3.5 midpoint.22 A quick glance at this figure reveals that, particularly with respect to the abstract conditions, NM’s scenario changes did indeed lead to lower rates of agreement with bypassing statements and correspondingly higher rates of agreement with MR/FW statements relative to their first study. NM argue that this lends further support to their claim that “mistaking

20 Figure 3 was constructed by the present author from data reported in Murray and Nahmias (2012), Table 1; some of the data it includes are also reported, in a format very similar to that used here, in Figure 1 of that article. Both the figure and table are © 2012, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC; copyright permissions for them are included here in Appendix B. Thanks to John Wiley and Sons for providing this permission. 21 NM report that concrete conditions were excluded from these analyses because participants in those conditions had already read and responded to the abstract cases (2012, n24). 22 Recall that scores above the 3.5 midpoint indicate responses that, when averaged, support the view that the agent is free and responsible, or that bypassing is occurring, in the corresponding scenarios. 86

determinism to entail bypassing is a causal factor leading participants to offer apparent incompatibilist judgments. We directly intervened on one variable, Bypassing, and it had an effect on the other variable, MR/FW responses” (2012, 20, emphasis in original). One final set of results from this study warrants consideration here. As noted above, NM hold that bypassing judgments amount to (or perhaps result from) performance errors, and that FW/MR intuitions based on such judgments therefore do not represent genuine commitments regarding the compatibility question. It is consequently of considerable interest whether those who fail to express such judgments evince any commitment to incompatibilist principles. In light of this, NM compiled data on “competent participants” – those “who do not conflate determinism with bypassing, but who understand what determinism does properly preclude” (2012, 17, emphasis in original). To do so, they excluded from analysis those participants who either (1) obtained Bypassing scores above the midpoint or (2) ‘missed’ the modal question regarding the deterministic implications of the scenario. The remaining participants expressed judgments strongly favoring compatibilism: MR/FW scores above the midpoint were obtained by 89% of participants in each of the concrete conditions, along with 62% in NK abstract and 78% in NMNT abstract. Perhaps with the exception of NK abstract, then, the intuitions of non- bypassers seem to strongly support a predominantly compatibilist understanding of pretheoretic thought on the compatibility question.23 According to NM, the results of these studies “demonstrate that the appearance of widespread incompatibilist intuitions among the folk is an illusion, based on the common confusion between determinism and bypassing” (2012, 28). This claim challenges DV by suggesting that the prima facie incompatibilist intuitions appealed to in the course of defending this thesis are merely apparent, and thus do not genuinely bear on the compatibility question. The ensuing investigation, though, shows that DV can be defended against this strong challenge.

5.2 The Many Faces of Bypassing

In evaluating the bypassing hypothesis, it is essential to keep in mind that this thesis is intended to be an ‘error theory’ for incompatibilist intuitions, and not for bypassing intuitions.

23 NM hold that NK abstract remains an outlier because it “is easily read to involve bypassing,” so that participants told otherwise “may simply be unsure about how to interpret” the case (2012, 27, emphasis in original). 87

To adequately defend the bypassing hypothesis (and thereby falsify DV), then, NM must support both of the following two claims:

(a) Bypassing judgments are (typically) errors.

(b) Bypassing judgments are (typically) related to FW/MR judgments in such a way that errors in the former also undermine the latter.

In what follows, I argue that both of these claims are dubious. This section evaluates (a), while (b) is taken up in the following section. Before commencing this discussion, however, a few preliminary comments are in order. First, I want to reiterate a caveat expressed in the previous chapter, to the effect that interpreting pretheoretic judgments is a messy business: rarely can one say definitively that such judgments always or never meet a given criterion. Because of this, nothing I say here should be taken to imply that prima facie incompatibilist intuitions ‘never’ amount to errors in the manner hypothesized by NM. In fact, NM’s arguments and empirical support for their position are impressive, and I am inclined to agree that their account offers a plausible explanation for some of the pretheoretic judgments at issue. The following arguments are therefore intended to show, not that the bypassing hypothesis is false, but that its scope is narrower than NM suggest, and thus that DV remains the most adequate response to the (descriptive) compatibility question. Second, and relatedly, there is a sense in which DV and the bypassing hypothesis may well be mutually compatible. Note, in this regard, that the MR/FW scores of the competent participants in NM’s second study do not reflect exclusively compatibilist-friendly intuitions: 11% of (again, competent) participants in each concrete condition, along with 22% in NMNT abstract and 38% in NK abstract, scored below the midpoint, thereby indicating a tendency to withhold FW and MR from deterministic agents despite agreeing that bypassing is not occurring with respect to these agents. These data suggest both that (a) some folk judgments, even on the part of non-bypassers, are conducive to incompatibilism, and that (b) contextual variation in the proportion of folk expressing such judgments persists even among non-bypassers. (Notably, even when the NK abstract scenario is excluded as unrepresentative, it remains the case that the percentage of participants obtaining incompatibilist-friendly MR/FW scores in NMNT abstract

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was twice that found in either of the concrete conditions). I take it, then, that even ‘competent’ participants demonstrate some incompatibilist-friendly commitments. If so, the important question for present purposes becomes whether these commitments are significant in a sense that would warrant acceptance of DV. My own view is that they may well meet this criterion, and that DV may therefore represent a defensible account of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question even if the bypassing hypothesis were to be vindicated.24 I realize, though, that this claim rests on a potentially controversial interpretation of ‘significance,’ and am therefore content to set it aside in favor of alternative methods of defending DV. Return now to the first of the two claims identified at the beginning of this section, to the effect that bypassing judgments are (typically) errors. This claim is true, according to NM, because those making these judgments tend to “conflate” or “confuse” determinism with bypassing (2012, 16). Now, since determinism does not entail bypassing,25 I am inclined to agree that ‘conflating’ the two would indeed amount to an error. But this may not be the best way to characterize the judgments of bypassers: it hints at the idea that they are somehow thinking about determinism and mistaking it for a closely related thesis, when their intuitions are certainly not this philosophically complex. The vast majority of bypassers do not know what either ‘determinism’ or ‘bypassing’ is, since both of these are technical terms.26 What bypassers are really doing is simply judging that certain statements are true of a given case. These statements arguably entail bypassing,27 and the description of the case arguably entails determinism. But neither of these entailments need be apparent to those making the judgments. In assessing the claim that bypassing judgments are errors, then, we need to be careful to distinguish the judgment that bypassing, in NM’s technical sense, is occurring from the judgment that the bypassing statements are true. It might be that, while the former judgment is a mistake, participants are not making it, perhaps because they read the bypassing statements in a different

24 At the end of section 2.3, I indicated that minority responses on the order of 20% may well indicate ‘significant commitments’ in the sense relevant to the descriptive compatibility question. It is worth emphasizing here that ignoring such minority responses is problematic: while the majority position is clearly important, treating it as “the” folk view runs a high risk of over-simplification. 25 Or so, at any rate, I granted above. 26 At least, they are technical terms in the sense at interest here. There may, as NM note, be a colloquial sense of ‘determinism’ on which it implies something like the claim that ‘there is no free will’ (2012, 6; see also van Inwagen 2009, 257). Regardless, it is determinism in the technical sense that is relevant here. (See section 1.1 for some brief remarks on this point.) 27 I argue shortly that the participants may have read the bypassing statements in a way that does not entail bypassing in NM’s technical sense. I allow, though, that these statements arguably imply bypassing in this sense. 89

way. In fact, Shepherd (2012) has suggested that at least one plausible reading of the bypassing statements arguably fails to entail bypassing in NM’s technical sense:

Three of the bypassing questions state that an agent’s desires, beliefs and decisions ‘had no effect’ on what the agent did. Nahmias and Murray seem to want these questions to be read literally…But it is possible that participants read ‘have no effect’ in a different way. When speaking of a game between American football teams Louisiana State and Arkansas, for example, it makes sense to say that Louisiana State’s defense ‘has no effect’ on Arkansas’ offense, even though Louisiana State players are making tackles…If participants read ‘had no effect’ in this way, then their pro-bypassing responses could be consistent with the view that agents’ desires, beliefs, and decisions play causal roles…they could be asserting that desires, beliefs and decisions are powerless to change anything. (2012, 923, emphasis in original)

Call NM’s reading of the bypassing statements, on which they imply bypassing in the technical sense, the ‘strict’ reading; Shepherd’s alternative reading, on which these statements do not imply this technical sense, may be correspondingly referred to as the ‘loose’ reading.28 While Shepherd omits discussion of the fourth and final bypassing statement (to the effect that a person ‘has no control over’ what they do), it too admits of a loose construal. It is colloquially common to voice claims of the form ‘x has no y’ without meaning this literally; for example, when I exclaim that legislative policy “makes no sense” I don’t mean that it is literally unintelligible.29 Similarly, if some friends decide to go to a movie, and another friend tells me she’d rather go to the pub, I might respond by saying something like “sorry, but it’s out of my control at this point – they’ve already decided.” In saying this, I do not mean that I am literally unable to causally affect whether my friends go to a movie. After all, I could slash all their tires, or (on a happier note) offer to pay all their tabs if they go to the pub instead. What I do mean is, roughly, that I have diminished control over what my friends do.

28 Björnsson and Pereboom (forthcoming) also distinguish between multiple readings of the bypassing statements, one of which arguably does not commit NM’s participants to any ‘confusion’ about the nature of determinism. 29 Consider also claims like “I have no money,” “she has no time to lose,” and “he has no idea what he’s doing.” These claims, when uttered, are rarely meant literally. 90

If NM’s participants read the ‘control’ statement in this loose way, then in agreeing with it they might be affirming a similar thought. Rather than holding that in the relevant scenario a person’s actions ‘are not causally dependent on’ her mental states, they might merely be expressing (potentially inchoate or rudimentary) concerns about diminished control, or perhaps, as Shepherd notes, reservations related to the possibility that these mental states ‘are powerless to change anything.’ The latter issue might be put in terms of the ability to do otherwise: participants might (again, inchoately) worry that it is not physically possible for the token mental states of agents in deterministic scenarios to cause any actions other than those they actually cause, and thus that these agents are unable to do anything other than what they actually do. Note that if participants did indeed understand the bypassing statements in this way, then agreement with them is arguably not a mistake. Committed incompatibilists commonly worry that determinism does either eliminate alternative possibilities (van Inwagen 1983; Ginet 1990; Kane 1996), diminish control (Kane 1996; O’Connor 2000; Pereboom 2001), or both; in fact, this is often a central motivation for their position.30 Such claims may, on reflection, turn out to be mistaken; whether this is so is a matter for philosophical (and, to an extent, empirical) study. But it is certainly not obvious that these worries constitute errors. One might put the point this way: if it is a mistake to think that determinism undermines control (or eliminates alternative possibilities), it is a mistake common in philosophical circles. Responses that reflect these concerns are thus not irrelevant to the descriptive compatibility question, since such responses could in fact represent an important way in which incompatibilism tracks pretheoretic intuitions. Whether any of NM’s participants actually did understand the bypassing statements in this way is a complicated issue. It is certainly possible that some more or less explicitly read these statements in the loose sense, while others read them in the strict sense. Here, though, is an additional hypothesis that strikes me as plausible: participants may not have distinguished between these senses, and thus have had neither reading explicitly in mind when responding to these statements. Perhaps quick replies on a short survey just don’t warrant that kind of precision. Instead, participants might have had a vague or undeveloped worry about control or related issues that they expressed by agreeing with the bypassing statements. It might simply be indeterminate, even to them, whether their concerns are best interpreted in the strict sense or the

30 Control-related concerns in the philosophical literature are quite diverse; for incompatibilists, they may take the form of worries about alternative possibilities, ‘ultimate’ sourcehood, or yet further issues. For a particularly cogent discussion of control as it concerns libertarianism, see Clarke (2003). 91

loose sense, perhaps because they haven’t fully or explicitly developed these concerns. Importantly, though, they might find the idea that there is some such concern intuitively clear. Characterizing that concern as either the (mistaken) worry that determinism implies bypassing or the (reasonable) claim that determinism diminishes control or access to alternative possibilities may amount to imbuing folk judgments with an unwarranted degree of philosophical precision. The problem, for NM, is that treating imprecise or vague concerns like these as mistakes seems at least uncharitable, if not unwarranted. Admittedly, these concerns lack clarity, and they come close to drawing unlicensed inferences, but they’re also in the neighborhood of some legitimate, philosophically defensible worries. Given this, there are two things we might say about the judgments of participants who understood the bypassing statements in this way; both are problematic for the bypassing hypothesis, since they imply that the intuitions of bypassers remain relevant to the compatibility question. First, we might say that since bypassers don’t explicitly understand these statements in the strict (mistaken) sense as opposed to the loose (reasonable) sense, they’re not really making errors – rather, they’re expressing a defensible judgment in an imprecise way. Second, we might say that bypassers are, strictly speaking, making errors, but that these errors are closely connected to (and perhaps conflated with) nearby genuine concerns. On this second interpretation, excluding bypassers from analyses amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater – we’re excluding people with genuine incompatibilist commitments because they make a philosophically sophisticated mistake. Notably, something like this second interpretation might be true even if participants explicitly understood the bypassing statements in NM’s strict sense. It is entirely possible to be attracted to incompatibilism on the basis of several different considerations, some plainly mistaken and others perfectly reasonable. That S endorses p on mistaken grounds q does not entail that S does not also endorse p on legitimate grounds r. Perhaps, then, some bypassers have legitimate grounds for the prima facie incompatibilist intuitions they express, but also have some mistaken grounds for these intuitions; asking them about bypassing might reveal the latter while potentially obscuring the former. If so, then excluding these participants would again involve ignoring an important aspect of pretheoretic thought on the compatibility question, since it would amount to discarding a significant proportion of responses provided by folk with genuine incompatibilist-friendly convictions. Thus, while I find it likely that many participants did not explicitly read the bypassing statements in the strict sense, I’m also not yet convinced that

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anyone who did read the statements in this way should be treated as expressing intuitions irrelevant to the question of whether determinism is compatible with FW and MR. Here, though, I have moved from consideration of bypassing judgments themselves to discussion of the relationship between these judgments and FW/MR judgments. That is, I have started to examine the second of the two points identified above. Consequently, I turn now to a more direct investigation of this issue.

5.3 Bypassing: Cause or Effect?

Since the present context focuses on the (descriptive) compatibility question, the pretheoretic judgments of greatest immediate relevance are those that concern FW and MR. Bypassing judgments, in contrast, are relevant only insofar as they bear in some interesting way on judgments of the former sort. One way in which they might do this is by being causes of FW/MR judgments, as NM contend. Their primary evidence in favor of this claim is constituted by the results of their mediation analyses, the general structure of which was described above. It should be clear from this description, though, that mediation analysis assumes a particular causal sequence; consequently, such an analysis can show that one’s data are consistent with a given causal hypothesis, but they cannot alone vindicate such a hypothesis.31 In outlining the procedures required for mediation analysis, Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger note that meeting each of the steps in this analysis “does not…conclusively establish that mediation has occurred because there are other (perhaps less plausible) models that are consistent with the data” (1998, 260; see also MacCallum et al. 1993). Two particular possibilities (that are, I shortly suggest, not ‘less plausible’ in the present case), are that “the mediator may be caused by the outcome variable… [or] they may cause each other. Often if the mediator and the outcome variable were interchanged, the outcome would seem to ‘cause’ the mediator” (1998, 262). That such ‘reverse causation’ does not occur is an assumption implicit in the model itself:

The use of multiple regression analysis presumes that the mediator is not caused by the dependent variable. It may be possible that we are mistaken about which

31 For help with issues of statistical interpretation relevant to the ensuing discussion (particularly issues bearing on mediation analysis), I am indebted to both Michael Kaschak and Jonathan Miller. Any remaining inaccuracies here are, of course, wholly my own. 93

variable is the mediator and which is the dependent variable. (Baron and Kenny 1986, 1177)

There are several important assumptions for tests of mediation. …The assumptions of a correctly specified model include no misspecification of causal order… [and] no misspecification of causal direction (e.g., there is reciprocal causation between the mediator and the dependent variable)…. (MacKinnon, Fairchild, and Fritz 2007, 8)

The upshot of all this, for present purposes, is that NM’s mediation analyses do not conclusively establish that bypassing judgments cause FW/MR judgments – in fact, the structure of these analyses assumes this causal order. NM’s data do provide some evidence for their causal hypothesis, insofar as it is consistent with these data. But, for all NM say, they’re also consistent with alternative hypotheses. In particular, they’re consistent with models on which, rather than Bypassing mediating MR/FW score, MR/FW score mediates Bypassing score. In addition to the results of their mediation analyses, NM contend that their second study provides further support for their causal claim, since “directly interven[ing] on” bypassing impacted MR/FW scores (2012, 20).32 But this is precisely what one might expect if bypassing and MR/FW are very tightly correlated (as, in fact, they are33), independently of any further causal hypotheses. Given this correlation, I would certainly expect that ‘directly intervening on’ FW/MR would impact bypassing. In fact, some aspects of NM’s own work can be understood as doing something very much like this: since FW/MR intuitions are known to vary with concreteness, manipulating the latter can be viewed as one method of ‘intervening on’ the former. And, as NM’s own data show, manipulating concreteness had unambiguous, and highly significant, impacts on bypassing judgments. Thus, this further consideration is also consistent with the possibility that FW/MR judgments exert some causal influence on bypassing judgments, rather than proceeding exclusively the other way around.

32 NM also make this claim about prior research, noting that their “causal conclusion draws additional support from [Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran’s] (2007) study, which manipulated a type of bypassing directly…and found that it significantly influenced participants’ attributions of MR and FW. Thus, previous evidence supports the conclusion that bypassing judgments mediate attributions of MR and FW, rather than the other way around” (2011, 207). While I lack the space to directly address this prior work here, the comments above apply equally to this claim. 33 Collapsing across all experimental conditions within each study, NM report a correlation coefficient for these two variables of –0.734 in their first study and –0.724 in their second (2012, 14, 20). 94

(i) Bypassing

a b

c Scenario MR/FW

(ii) MR/FW (iii) Bypassing

a b a b c Scenario c Bypassing Scenario MR/FW

Figure 4: Hypotheses on the causal relationships between scenario, bypassing, and MR/FW.

While there are a variety of ways in which this might happen, two models that I find especially plausible are represented in Figure 4. This figure depicts three possibilities, each taking a form similar to that depicted earlier in Figure 2 (in which the observed causal relation represented by path c is mediated by the hypothesized causal relations corresponding to paths a and b). The first of these is the model suggested by NM, according to which the relationship between scenario description (the initial variable) and MR/FW score (the outcome variable) is mediated by Bypassing score. On model (ii), in contrast, the relationship between scenario description and Bypassing is mediated by MR/FW. This model, if supported by empirical data, would suggest that FW/MR judgments cause bypassing judgments. Model (iii) depicts a slightly more complicated possibility in which (a) scenario description acts as a cause of both Bypassing and MR/FW, and (b) Bypassing and MR/FW also have causal impacts on each other. On this hypothesis, the two sets of judgments reflected in the composite scores causally interact, with judgments about bypassing having a causal effect on FW/MR judgments and vice versa; there is, as MacKinnon, Fairchild, and Fritz suggest, “reciprocal causation” between the judgments in these two categories. Now, NM’s data appear to be consistent with any of these models. Which of them is most accurate is, however, an issue of central importance for the bypassing hypothesis. To see this, note that if FW/MR judgments are not caused by bypassing judgments, then even if bypassing judgments are errors, this need not undermine associated judgments about free will

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and moral responsibility. Suppose that model (ii) above is correct, so that FW/MR judgments cause bypassing judgments. Then the fact – if it is a fact – that the latter are errors says little, if anything, about whether or not the former are genuine. That judgment x causes mistaken judgment y is no (or, at least, not much of a) reason to think that judgment x is itself mistaken. (Think here of most any case involving good inductive reasoning to a false conclusion. For example, if a scientist judges that all observed instances of x have property P, she might conclude that all x are P. That the latter judgment is false does not impugn the former.) The same point applies if model (iii) is correct. If judgment x and judgment y exert mutual causal impact on each other, then the fact that the latter is mistaken need not show that the former is as well. My judgment that Jones is prone to violence might lead me to judge that Jones committed the murder, and this might lead me to judge even more strongly that Jones has violent tendencies. If Jones is innocent, that doesn’t make me wrong about her predilection for violence.34 As regards NM’s participants, these causal hypotheses could manifest themselves in something like the following manner. Participants read a scenario; they judge that the description provided in this scenario precludes FW and/or MR. Notably, they don’t explicitly engage in conscious reasoning to this conclusion from any premises – they just read a scenario and have an intuition. Then, they’re asked whether they agree that (for example) in this scenario “a person’s decisions have no effect on what they end up doing.” Having already judged that in this scenario no one is free (or responsible, etc.), they’re inclined to agree, for the following (inchoate) reasons. First, that a person’s decisions have no effect on what she ends up doing is an excellent reason to think that she isn’t free or morally responsible. It thus provides a very compelling (post-hoc) justification for a judgment they’ve already made. Second, if they disagree, then they’re saying that the scenario precludes FW and MR, but people’s decisions do have effects on their behavior. The anti-bypassing response might thus appear to conflict with their prior

34 Notably, it’s possible to make a similar point about the relationship between bypassing judgments and FW/MR judgments even if NM’s account of this relationship is entirely correct. That is, even if bypassing judgments do cause FW/MR judgments, that needn’t impugn the latter (since it’s obviously possible to infer a truth from a falsehood). I take it, though, that NM are absolutely right to claim that their causal story, if accurate, raises significant questions about participants’ FW/MR judgments. The claims here, then, may be understood as suggesting that this causal story may well not be accurate, and that FW/MR judgments are therefore not called into question in this way. 96

judgments – perhaps it even seems to contradict these judgments.35 So, in the interest of consistency, they opt for bypassing. Thus far, I’ve told a ‘just-so’ story, albeit one that is consistent with NM’s data. There are, though, several considerations suggesting that the alternative causal hypotheses identified above, on which FW/MR judgments have causal effects on bypassing judgments, are at least as plausible as NM’s account, if not more so. These considerations may be roughly sorted into three groups, on the basis of whether they pertain to (a) theoretical simplicity, (b) experimental design, or (c) statistical incompleteness. Here, each of these groups is discussed in turn. First, issues pertaining to theoretical simplicity favor alternative causal hypotheses over NM’s preferred account. To see this, note that participants expressing anti-bypassing intuitions seem much more likely to form judgments with an etiology corresponding to one of the models just introduced than one analogous to NM’s hypothesized explanation. Consider those in the NK concrete condition of NM’s first study, who read that Bill kills his family to be with his secretary.36 75% of prima facie compatibilist participants in this condition (i.e., those whose MR/FW score was above the 3.5 midpoint) also obtained Bypassing scores below 3.5.37 What causal story might we tell about these anti-bypassing participants? Briefly, there are least three possibilities here; each corresponds to one of the causal models depicted in Figure 4 above. Thus, we might say that these participants first form anti- bypassing judgments, and that this then causes them to conclude that Bill is free and responsible. This is what we might call the “anti-bypassing analog” of the bypassing hypothesis, since it postulates, consistently with NM’s account, a causal relationship from bypassing to FW/MR.38 On the other hand, one might think that these participants first judge that Bill is free and responsible, and that this causes them to deny that bypassing is occurring. This second possibility corresponds to model (ii) above, on which FW/MR judgments cause bypassing

35 Of course, the claims that (1) FW and MR are precluded in the relevant scenario and (2) the bypassing statements are false of that scenario do not actually contradict each other. The claim here is only that some experimental participants (who generally lack training in philosophy) might have the impression that they do. 36 Recall that NM’s second study, in contrast, used a lower-affect version of NK concrete in which Bill steals an expensive necklace to impress a co-worker to whom he is attracted. 37 Note, incidentally, that this implies that roughly a quarter of prima facie compatibilists endorsed both bypassing and FW/MR. I am frankly unsure how to interpret this rather surprising combination of responses beyond noting that it complicates any attempt to postulate a straightforward causal relationship between the two sets of judgments. 38 I do not mean to suggest here that NM are committed to this causal picture. Rather, my claim is only that this picture is structurally analogous to the causal relationship that, they hold, obtains between pro-bypassing judgments and anti-FW/MR judgments. I return to this point momentarily. 97

judgments. Third, there might be (reciprocal) causal interaction between both sets of judgments, along the lines of the hypothesis represented by model (iii). The latter two hypotheses, I submit, are significantly more plausible than the first. These participants have just finished reading a vignette in which a man burns down his house and kills his family. Their most immediate reactions to this seem very likely to involve condemning Bill for his horrendous actions, rather than making judgments about his degree of control. (The reader is encouraged to imagine being a participant in this experiment. What would you be thinking about?) Control-relevant considerations might then incline them to accept or reject these immediate reactions, and perhaps the latter also (reciprocally) bias their assessment of the former – but these issues arise after they’ve formed initial normative evaluations of the case. Thus, I suggest that many participants who read about Bill’s abhorrent behavior immediately form a very negative moral evaluation of Bill, and are correspondingly inclined to blame him. Subsequently, when asked whether they agree that Bill’s decisions, say, “have no effect on” his actions, they disagree – naturally, since agreeing would conflict with their antecedently formed (pro-)FW/MR judgments in a fairly obvious way. Philosophers confronted with Bill’s case might reason from intuitions about agency (or bypassing) to a conclusion about free will, but I find it highly unlikely that untrained participants are doing anything similar. Two points about this explanation warrant mention here. First, the causal story I’ve just told readily generalizes to scenarios other than NK concrete. While this particular case is extremely affect-laden, and therefore especially likely to generate immediate and strong judgments of condemnation, I see no reason to think that evaluative judgments don’t also precede bypassing judgments in other concrete scenarios, as when Bill (or Jill) is said to steal a necklace rather than kill someone. (That such judgments may be less forceful implies little if anything with respect to their immediacy.) And, for that matter, it seems to me at least possible that a similar explanation might account for the judgments of some anti-bypassers in abstract conditions. Admittedly, the etiology of anti-bypassing (and pro-FW/MR) judgments in these contexts is more difficult to assess, particularly since abstract contexts lack the affective component appealed to in the preceding explanation. But I don’t think we should rule out the possibility that people are very finely attuned to normative considerations, and as a result are predisposed to form judgments pertinent to these considerations very quickly. The possibility that an alternative to NM’s causal hypothesis might explain anti-bypassing intuitions in abstract

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contexts is also strengthened once we allow, as we ought, that the reciprocal causal model (that is, model (iii)) is a live possibility. At the very least, I do not think that NM have established that their model is superior to these alternatives. The second notable aspect of this causal story is that it seems to fit quite nicely with a variety of well-known accounts in other areas of moral psychology. On many of these accounts, when people respond to morally valenced situations their evaluative reactions act as input to, rather than being inferences from, judgments related to control and agency. So, for example, Mark Alicke’s “culpable control” model of blame posits “negative spontaneous evaluations [that] contribute to a blame-validation mode of structural linkage assessment…observers review structural linkage evidence in a biased manner [partly] by exaggerating the actor’s volitional or causal control” (2000, 558, emphasis in original). In other words, people’s ‘negative spontaneous evaluations’ can causally impact their judgments of control. Alicke (1992) has also argued that judgments of blameworthiness can influence judgments relevant to causation; Knobe and Fraser (2008) suggest a similar account. Thomas Nadelhoffer (2004) contends that judgments of blame can affect intentionality judgments. Finally, Jonathan Haidt’s well-known “social intuitionist” account holds that “moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions),” and that “moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached” (2001, 814; see also Haidt and Bjorklund 2008). In light of all this, it would hardly be surprising if FW/MR judgments caused bypassing judgments, rather than the other way around. Now, the preceding points do not falsify NM’s view, since they need not claim that the relationship between anti-bypassing judgments and MR/FW judgments is the same as that in the case of pro-bypassing judgments. (Notably, though, they do hold that NK’s “description of determinism may lead people to interpret it to involve bypassing (in both the abstract and concrete cases), but this mistake may be ‘cancelled out’ in the concrete, but not in the abstract case, because of the latter’s high negative affect” (2012, 10). This suggests – although it does not entail – a picture on which some NK concrete participants respond to this case by first forming pro-bypassing judgments that are later revised.39) It does, however, imply that the bypassing hypothesis lacks a certain degree of parsimony. To adopt the view that (many) prima facie compatibilist participants form (pro-)FW/MR judgments prior to (anti-)bypassing

39 I return to this explanation of NK concrete below, in the final pages of this section. 99

judgments, NM must hold that the etiology of judgments in these cases differs from the associated etiology in the case of pro-bypassers – that is, they’d have to posit two distinct sets of causal processes. Moreover, their causal hypothesis with respect to (pro-)bypassers fails to mesh well with the accounts in moral psychology noted above; this is another sense in which the bypassing hypothesis lacks theoretical simplicity. In contrast, the opposing view – that FW/MR judgments causally impact bypassing judgments – can tell a causal story that is consistent across all four conditions. Insofar as one causal explanation is preferable to two, then, this opposing view demonstrates an advantage over NM’s hypothesis. Moreover, one aspect of NM’s experimental design strongly suggests that the alternative causal hypotheses are preferable to NM’s account. Specifically, in order to replicate NK’s experimental procedure, NM’s studies were designed such that a question about moral responsibility was always first. While the order of the remaining bypassing and MR/FW statements was randomized, this design ensured that every participant explicitly expressed at least one judgment about MR and FW before doing the same with respect to bypassing. Again, imagine being a participant in one of NM’s studies. You’ve read the scenario, and perhaps have formed some initial or ‘gut’ reactions to it, but you haven’t yet made any explicit, conscious judgments about the case. You’re then asked whether the scenario allows for ‘full’ moral responsibility, and consciously reason about what to say, eventually forming an explicit judgment that accords with your immediate intuitions about the scenario. Then you’re asked whether you agree with the bypassing statements. Now, you’ve already expressed a specific judgment about moral responsibility. In determining whether you agree with these statements, then, it seems only natural to take your prior judgment about the scenario into account – but by doing so, you allow your intuitions about moral responsibility to figure in your deliberations about bypassing. This picture reflects a hypothesis about the relationship between participants’ overtly expressed judgments about bypassing and FW/MR that mirrors the preceding view of their reasoning processes prior to overt expression. That is, I’ve suggested above that participants’ internal reasoning processes might be such that FW/MR judgments causally impact bypassing judgments, in response to a conflicting hypothesis adopted by NM. Any such judgments are, of course, subject to modification up to the point at which participants actually put pen to paper and express a view about the cases, and it is these overtly expressed views that figure in NM’s

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statistical analyses. Given that the first overtly expressed judgment was, in every case, one about moral responsibility, we have very good reason to think that this MR judgment influenced later overtly expressed judgments (including bypassing judgments), whatever we say about the internal reasoning processes that led to these judgments. Thus, two conclusions appear warranted. First, since the mediation analyses concern overtly expressed judgments, it is overwhelmingly likely that the correct mediational picture is one according to which (overtly expressed) FW and MR judgments causally impact (overtly expressed) bypassing judgments, rather than exclusively the other way around.40 Second, this relationship between overtly expressed judgments suggests (again, partly on grounds of theoretical simplicity) a corresponding relationship between the internal reasoning processes that give rise to these expressed views of the cases. Turn, finally, to considerations bearing on what I have called ‘statistical incompleteness.’ Broadly speaking, these considerations suggest that NM’s mediation analyses themselves provide only a limited basis for any inferences about the causal relationship at issue. For example, in their second study the results of this analysis only achieved marginal significance; any causal conclusions drawn from such an analysis should therefore be approached with caution. Moreover, the results of the mediation analysis performed in their first study also indicate some ambiguity with respect to causal order. The strength of such results depends not just on the extent to which path c (that is, the connection between the initial and outcome variables) is accounted for by paths a and b (respectively, the connections between the initial variable and the hypothesized mediator, and between the mediator and the outcome variable). Rather, the relative strengths of paths a and b are themselves important, as Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger explain:

To demonstrate mediation both paths a and b…need to be relatively large…The mediator can be too close in time or in the process to the initial variable and so a would be relatively large and b relatively small…Alternatively, the mediator can be chosen too close to the outcome and with a distal mediator b is large and a is small. Ideally, standardized a and b should be comparable in size. (1998, 261)

40 In their discussion of mediation analysis, Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger note that “ideally, the mediator should be measured before the outcome variable” (1998, 262). Since NM’s participants did not address bypassing until after MR, this is additional reason to think that the results of their mediation analyses should be interpreted with caution. 101

Now, NM’s mediation analysis of the data obtained in their first study resulted in standardized regression coefficients of –0.20 for path a, and –0.74 for path b (2012, 15). This is evidence for what Kenny, Kashy, and Bolger call ‘distal’ mediation, in which the hypothesized mediator – here Bypassing score – is very close, temporally or etiologically, to the hypothesized outcome variable – here MR/FW score. This proximity suggests that discerning the nature of the causal relation between these variables on the basis of this analysis would be difficult (to say the least), which represents a further reason to think that NM’s mediation analyses provide only limited support for their causal hypothesis. Furthermore, in both studies mediation analysis was confined to the abstract conditions. This is understandable, given NM’s contention (with which I wholly agree) that including concrete conditions would have introduced affect as a confounding variable. Yet, their causal hypothesis is not likewise restricted in this way: their view is not that bypassing judgments cause participants to deny FW and MR in abstract cases, but that this causal relationship holds full stop. Given that the data supporting this relationship is restricted to abstract cases, NM’s generalization from these cases to all cases appears unmotivated. In fact, a modicum of evidence suggests that bypassing does not mediate MR/FW judgments in the concrete scenarios. Return to Figure 3 above, which compares the proportion of pro-bypassing and pro-MR/FW judgments in NM’s first study to that in their second. As this figure makes clear, the primary manipulation introduced in their second study – that is, explicitly telling participants that bypassing was not occurring – led to lower rates of bypassing judgments, and correspondingly higher rates of pro-MR/FW judgments, in the abstract conditions. Importantly, though, in the concrete conditions this manipulation resulted in lower rates of bypassing judgments without significantly affecting MR/FW judgments. In the concrete conditions, the percentage of bypassers dropped from 37% in the NK case and 35% in the NMNT case to 25% and 12%, respectively. But the percentage of participants affirming FW and MR remained virtually unchanged, differing by only a single percentage point in each case. What this suggests is that in the concrete cases manipulating bypassing had no effect on MR and FW judgments. This result is difficult to interpret, given the presence of various confounding factors (including, most prominently, (a) variations in affect and (b) the fact that participants in study 2 responded to an abstract case before seeing its concrete variant, while those in study 1 did not).

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Nonetheless, it is suggestive. In particular, if bypassing judgments cause judgments about FW and MR, then a decrease in the frequency of the former should, ceteris paribus, cause a corresponding decrease in the frequency of the latter; prima facie, one would expect this correlation to hold regardless of concreteness. But this is not what the data show: rather, they show bypassing judgments varying independently of MR/FW judgments in the concrete scenarios. This casts significant doubt on NK’s causal hypothesis, particularly with respect to judgments formed in concrete contexts. Now, it remains open to NM to preserve this causal hypothesis by postulating an additional factor, present in concrete but not abstract contexts, that ‘interferes with’ the causal link between bypassing and FW/MR judgments. In fact, NM’s discussion of NK concrete suggests precisely this type of defense:

If the high negative affect in [NK concrete] biases people to judge that Bill is morally responsible for killing his family, it may also lead many participants to neglect features of the scenario that might otherwise mitigate their responsibility attributions, such as bypassing. In other words, [NK’s] description of determinism may lead people to interpret it to involve bypassing (in both the abstract and concrete cases), but this mistake may be “cancelled out” in the concrete, but not in the abstract case, because of the latter’s high negative affect (Bill’s killing his family). (2012, 10)

One might think that this explanation readily generalizes from the NK concrete case to account for the failure of bypassing judgments to impact FW/MR judgments in other concrete scenarios as well. Perhaps affect simply ‘overrides’ participants’ inclinations toward bypassing in these scenarios. There is, however, reason to think that this explanation fails to adequately defend NM’s account against the alternative causal hypotheses considered above. Notably, the requisite generalization of this explanation to cover concrete scenarios other than NK’s renders it susceptible to some of the same criticisms that undermine NK’s affective performance error hypothesis. For example, many of the concrete scenarios employed in the experimental literature, including all of NM’s concrete scenarios other than the version of NK concrete

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employed in their first study, are not especially high-affect. Given this, it’s difficult to appeal to affect to explain the failure of the bypassing manipulation to impact FW/MR judgments in these other scenarios. Additionally, this explanation predicts that individuals with deficits in emotional processing should be less likely to have their bypassing intuitions “overridden” by affect, and correspondingly less likely to offer compatibilist-friendly responses to cases like NK concrete. As discussed in the previous chapter, though, Florian Cova and colleagues (2012) investigated the FW/MR intuitions of individuals with precisely such emotional deficits, and failed to find any differences in the intuitions of these individuals relative to those of unimpaired control participants.41 The alternative causal hypotheses proposed above, in contrast, can explain the failure of bypassing to impact FW/MR in concrete scenarios without appealing to problematic additional features like affect. The need for such an appeal arises on NM’s account because this account treats bypassing judgments as a cause of FW/MR judgments, and manipulating events earlier in the causal chain ought, barring interference, to impact later events. On the alternative pictures, where FW/MR judgments (perhaps reciprocally) cause bypassing judgments, NM are manipulating later events, not earlier ones – and such manipulations need not have any impact on (earlier) FW/MR judgments. Put simply, on these hypotheses NM are manipulating the effect, which unsurprisingly has little impact on the cause. The accounts offered here thus readily explain why bypassing manipulations fail to change FW/MR judgments in concrete contexts. One might wonder, though, whether this account has trouble explaining NM’s results in abstract contexts, where the bypassing manipulation did have an effect on FW/MR judgments. The short answer is no. If bypassing judgments are (partly) inferred from FW/MR judgments, then evidence against the conclusion of this inference can have two distinct effects. One might take this evidence to call the inference itself into question: perhaps it is unjustified to draw conclusions about bypassing on the basis of FW and MR. Importantly, this possibility need not undermine intuitions about the latter notions. On the other hand, one might take evidence against the conclusion of an inference to suggest that one should revisit one’s grounds for this inference. That is, one might question the evidence in support of a mistaken conclusion – where

41 See section 4.3. As I note there, Cova and colleagues’ data may be susceptible to alternative explanations that render these data consistent with the claim that affect impacts FW/MR judgments in concrete scenarios. Nonetheless, these data remain suggestive. 104

this ‘evidence,’ in the present case, consists of FW/MR intuitions.42 Something like this second type of response might lead participants to revise their initial FW/MR judgments, while something like the first might lead others not to do so. The fact that the alternative causal hypotheses are consistent with each of these ways of responding to evidence against bypassing allows them to account for contextual differences in the effects of this evidence without appealing to interference in either causal chain. To do so, we simply need some reason to think that the first type of response (questioning the inference) is more likely in concrete contexts, while the second type (questioning the grounds of the inference) predominates in abstract contexts. Here is one possibility: FW/MR intuitions in abstract contexts are weaker, and therefore more amenable to revision, while in concrete contexts participants are more confident in these intuitions, and are correspondingly less likely to question them.43 It seems plausible to think that participants would be less inclined to question the FW/MR judgments that lead to conclusions about bypassing (and correspondingly more inclined to question the inference from the former to the latter) to the extent that they are confident in their FW/MR intuitions. Moreover, since the vast majority of FW and, especially, MR judgments concern specific people behaving in a particular way, it also seems plausible to think that participants would indeed be more confident in these judgments in concrete contexts than in their abstract variants. Thus, this explanation strikes me as a viable way to account for contextual differences in the effects of bypassing manipulations on FW/MR judgments. While I wouldn’t explicitly endorse it without further evidence, I do find it more plausible than the explanation of these differences suggested by NM’s causal hypothesis. I conclude, then, that the alternative causal pictures, relative to this hypothesis, both (a) offer a more satisfying explanation for the failure of the bypassing manipulation to impact FW/MR intuitions in concrete contexts, and (b) also

42 Two points warrant brief mention here. First, notice that on NM’s account these two potential effects are not independent, as they are here. If bypassing judgments cause FW/MR judgments, then undermining the grounds of this inference should undermine both the inference and its conclusion (again, barring some other factor that interferes with this process). Second, one might worry that taking evidence against the conclusion of an inference to count against the grounds for that inference amounts to denying the consequent. Were the inference in question intended to be deductively valid, this would be a legitimate complaint. In cases of everyday inference, though, it is both common and reasonable to revisit one’s grounds for an inference when the conclusion of that inference is called into question (e.g. the program on channel five is not the one I expected, so I re-check the TV guide). 43 This is consistent with the claim that both sets of intuitions are genuine. That one (kind of) intuition is weaker than another does not make it an error. 105

potentially offer a more satisfying explanation for the difference between these contexts and their abstract variants, in which this manipulation did have an effect. In summary, there are (at least) three sets of considerations suggesting that bypassing judgments do not cause MR/FW judgments (or that, if they do, this causation is reciprocal, with the latter judgments also causally impacting the former). First, the alternative causal hypotheses are both more theoretically unified and more plausible, particularly in their explanations of anti- bypassing judgments. Second, NM’s own experimental design favors these alternative hypotheses: since participants always received a moral responsibility question first, their overt expressions of judgments about bypassing were almost certainly causally impacted by prior MR judgments. Third, NM’s mediation analyses themselves are both (a) statistically inconclusive and (b) limited in scope; in particular, there is presently no evidence suggesting that bypassing judgments mediate FW/MR judgments in concrete contexts, and some evidence suggesting that they do not – evidence which seems better accommodated by the alternative causal pictures. It seems to me that a plausible conclusion in light of these considerations is that FW/MR judgments exert some (perhaps reciprocal) causal impact on bypassing judgments, rather than the other way around. Notice, though, that the claims being defended here only require a significantly weaker conclusion. To defend DV as the most adequate response to the descriptive compatibility question given presently available data, it suffices to show that competing explanations of these data do not conclusively show that they encompass, or result from, performance errors. (This is because, as I have remarked above,44 the burden of proof is on those theorists who would deny that the relevant intuitions are genuine; these intuitions should be taken at face value until we are given good reason not to do so.) Thus, while much of my argument in this section has consisted in presenting evidence in support of alternatives to NM’s causal hypothesis, the burden of proof I bear does not require me to vindicate these alternative accounts. Rather, for present purposes I need only show that it is an open question whether FW/MR intuitions are typically caused in the manner NM suggest. It follows from this that it is an open question whether these intuitions result from performance errors, and that suggests that it is an open question whether these intuitions themselves are errors. This weaker conclusion – to the effect that there are viable alternatives to NM’s causal hypothesis – is, in my view, certainly warranted in light of the

44 See the end of section 3.3. 106

preceding discussion, regardless of one’s view of the (stronger) claim that in some cases NM’s suggested causal order is actually reversed. In light of this discussion, it seems to me that DV has the resources to withstand the challenges posed to this thesis by the bypassing hypothesis. While NM’s theoretical defense of, and empirical support for, their account is impressive, their claim that the incompatibilist- friendly intuitions that typically accompany bypassing judgments are mistakes is questionable. First, it remains unclear whether pretheoretic judgments in favor of bypassing actually are errors in any way that should cause researchers to discount these judgments in addressing the descriptive question. Second, the question of whether bypassing intuitions are causally related to FW/MR intuitions in a manner that would allow the former to undermine the latter remains unresolved; thus, the incompatibilist-friendly intuitions of bypassers may be genuine even if their pro-bypassing judgments are mistaken. For these reasons, I conclude that DV can be successfully defended against the bypassing hypothesis.

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CHAPTER SIX:

THE FUTURE OF DESCRIPTIVE VARIANTISM

In Chapter Three, I argued for a conditional thesis: if pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question, as elicited in extant research, are (by and large) genuine, then descriptive variantism (DV) currently represents the most plausible response to the descriptive version of this question.1 I also suggested (in section 3.3) that the burden of proof with respect to the antecedent of this conditional is on those who would falsify it, since pretheoretic intuitions ought to be viewed as genuine unless and until we are given good reasons to think otherwise. Chapters Four and Five, in turn, argued against the two most prominent accounts that might be taken to provide such reasons. The result is a kind of plausibility argument in favor of DV: the conditional (I claim) is true, and the balance of available evidence favors the truth of its antecedent; therefore, this evidence also favors the truth of its consequent – i.e., DV. Descriptive variantism thus constitutes the most adequate response to the descriptive compatibility question in light of extant data. As a plausibility argument, this justification of DV is not unassailable. In particular, there is always the possibility that new data will come to light, or a new performance error account of this data will be developed, that challenges DV. This is a good thing, since it shows that my account of folk commitments on these issues is appropriately falsifiable: such is the nature of empirical hypotheses. Should future evidence cast doubt on DV, I would be happy to revise my position so as to accommodate this evidence. Still, there is reason to think that something more or less like DV is probably here to stay. First, a few considerations suggest that this thesis is likely to withstand any challenges from performance error hypotheses that might be forthcoming. Second, while there remains significant debate over whether the contextual variation appealed to in defending DV tends to promote error in certain circumstances, that there is this variation – that is, that folk do in fact offer judgments that seem to be conducive to differing views in differing contexts – is no longer

1 This claim employs technical terminology adopted in earlier chapters: in particular, “genuine” intuitions are those that result from competence(s) rather than performance errors (as stipulated in section 2.1), and descriptive variantism (DV) holds, roughly, that pretheoretic intuitions exhibit significant commitments to both compatibilism and incompatibilism. (A more complete version of DV is formulated in section 2.3.) 108

much in dispute. This suggests that even if DV is itself unsustainable, some closely related thesis is very likely correct. The practical and theoretical implications of DV and these related theses are, then, worthy of investigation. This final chapter takes up these issues in two sections. The first of these outlines my reasons for thinking that DV, or something very much like it, is unlikely to be successfully challenged in the near future. This section may therefore be viewed partly as my ‘closing arguments’ in defense of this thesis. In section two, I highlight what I take to be some of the most important consequences of the preceding discussion in its entirety, and indicate a few directions in which future work might seek to address some of the issues raised by this discussion. There, it should become clear that the conclusions reached thus far are in many ways merely preliminary; several crucial questions remain regarding the implications of these conclusions for future work. Before commencing, one brief caveat is in order; this is that fully defending many of the claims made in this chapter would require discussion that I am unable to provide here. This shortcoming is unfortunately unavoidable, for two main reasons. First, both sections primarily address issues that might arise in future work, and in virtue of this often take on a speculative character. Their predictions are, in my view, plausible, but these predictions are not meant to constitute guarantees. Second, in several places the points made here touch on some complex theoretical issues that space constraints prevent me from completely addressing in this chapter – or, indeed, in any essay of a similar length. (In some cases, comprehensive study of these issues would require a book-length treatment.2) Thus, while the considerations raised here are suggestive, developing them beyond this point is an activity that must be pursued at a later date.

6.1 The Persistence of Contextual Variation

While the immediately preceding chapters supported DV primarily by appealing to considerations specific to the performance error accounts at issue there, some more general points suggest that (a) performance error hypotheses in general are unlikely to convincingly undermine DV and that (b) even if DV itself is ultimately successfully challenged, a closely related hypothesis will remain justifiable. Here, I briefly discuss each of these points in turn.

2 In fact, some have already been the subject of such treatments, as I occasionally note below. 109

Regarding (a), in discussing both NK’s and NM’s accounts3 I noted that some contextual variation persists even on the assumption that one of these accounts is wholly vindicated, and that this residual variation might itself suffice to establish DV.4 This point likely generalizes to any plausible performance error account that might be forthcoming, since no experimental manipulation of which I am aware has succeeded in eliminating this variation – or even, in my view, in diminishing it to an extent that would call DV into question. In order to challenge DV, these accounts would have to hold that the vast majority of pretheoretic intuitions appearing to favor either compatibilism or incompatibilism result from performance errors. The most initially plausible method of doing so would involve highlighting some feature that, first, tends to co- occur in nearly all cases with one or the other type of intuition, and second, is plausibly taken to indicate some type of mistake. To date, though, the features that seem most likely to satisfy the first of these criteria are affect or lack thereof and abstraction or concreteness – and none of these seems especially likely to satisfy the second criterion. I have already argued this point with respect to affect,5 and will not defend it again here. Regarding the absence of affect, I see no good reason to think that genuine intuitions on the compatibility question must be accompanied by emotional processes. After all, if this were true it might impugn the intuitions of many philosophers, who strive to develop their theories in accordance with reason rather than emotion. As to abstraction and concreteness, everyday life commonly requires judgments in both contexts, and in neither case do these judgments seem especially unreliable. For example, judgments about the immediate future tend to present themselves concretely (i.e., in more detail), while those pertaining to the long-term are typically more abstract.6 The former are often quite accurate, and the latter, while perhaps less so, remain generally correct. (For example, we can usually predict correctly where we will be living in a few months, what our profession will be, who will be president, etc.) I therefore find it likely that the most plausible performance error

3 Recall that ‘NK’ abbreviates Nichols and Knobe (2007), while ‘NM’ refers to both Nahmias and Murray (2011) and Murray and Nahmias (2012). 4 Whether DV is warranted in light of any residual variation depends on whether this variation is sufficiently pervasive to establish the existence of ‘significant’ folk commitments to both compatibilism and incompatibilism, as discussed in section 2.3. (Recall my suggestion there that if, say, 20% of the relevant intuitions favor incompatibilism, this probably suffices to constitute a ‘significant’ commitment to that thesis.) 5 See the discussion of NK’s account in Chapter Four. 6 On the relationship between temporal distance and abstraction, see Weigel (2011, 810–1) and the work of Nira Liberman, Yaacov Trope, and colleagues (Liberman, Sagristano, and Trope 2002; Nussbaum, Trope, and Liberman 2003; Liberman et al. 2007; Liberman and Trope 2008). 110

accounts will locate the source of these errors in properties or mechanisms distinct from affect and abstraction as such. Since these properties or mechanisms would be distinct from those that represent the most plausible sources of contextual variation in intuitions on the compatibility question, they may well fail to support a performance error account with a scope broad enough to challenge DV. Moreover, some recent evidence compiled by Weigel (2011) indicates that even the abstract-concrete distinction itself might not track the divide between pretheoretic compatibilist- and incompatibilist-friendly intuitions as closely as one might think. In particular, it now appears that in certain circumstances some features of abstract contexts can actually be employed to motivate compatibilism, despite the fact that these features are more commonly associated with folk tendencies toward incompatibilist-friendly responses. As Weigel notes, some evidence indicates that increasing the temporal distance associated with an action – thereby promoting a more abstract context – can prime people to focus relatively more on the global attitudes and character traits that might be associated with that action, as opposed to any situational features that may have been relevant to its performance (812-3; see also Nussbaum, Trope, and Liberman 2003). Further, agents seem more likely to be viewed as identifying with their actions when observers take these actions to accord with the agents’ global behavioral dispositions, and identification has been shown to be conducive to compatibilist judgments.7 Weigel therefore hypothesized that increasing abstraction by extending temporal distance would “produce an increase in compatibilist intuitions when affect is not in play” (2011, 816). And, in fact, this is exactly what she found: her participants were more likely to respond compatibilistically to a deterministic case involving a speeding driver when they were told to imagine hearing about this case in a few years, rather than in a few days. Now, some caveats regarding this study are warranted. First, to my knowledge it has yet to be replicated. Second, the difference between the two conditions, while statistically

7 Weigel’s primary evidence in favor of the latter connection (between identification and compatibilism) is constituted by data reported in Woolfolk, Doris, and Darley (2006), which was discussed briefly in section 3.2 above. Weigel does not directly cite any empirical evidence in favor of the former connection (between global traits and identification); rather, she claims that “to be identified with an action is to do the action out of one’s values and one’s broad dispositional traits,” which seems to suggest that the connection between global traits and identification follows conceptually rather than empirically (2011, 816). This strikes me as plausible, but those wanting empirical support for this connection might look to, e.g., work indicating that behaviors viewed as according with global traits are more likely to be judged as intentional (Sripada 2010; Sripada and Konrath 2011; Sripada 2012). If, as seems likely, agents are more likely to be seen as identifying with intentional actions than unintentional actions, then these studies might help establish a link between global traits and identification. 111

significant, was modest. Participants reported their degree of belief that the agent acted freely on a seven-point Likert scale; the mean score on this scale differed only by about one point between conditions, and failed to cross the midline.8 Third, both versions of the case concern a specific agent (“Bill Smith”), and thus are probably best construed as concrete, although one appears to be more so than the other. Despite these caveats, Weigel’s results are intriguing insofar as they suggest that the compatibilism-incompatibilism divide may actually cut across certain aspects of the abstract- concrete distinction. If so, then it may be difficult to successfully appeal to the latter difference in order to undermine one of the former types of intuition. For example, even if concrete contexts were conducive to systematic error, compatibilist-friendly intuitions occurring in more abstract contexts might remain unchallenged; in the reverse case, undermining these more abstract contexts may prove to call intuitions supporting both camps into question. This, then, is further reason to think that a performance error account that could convincingly challenge DV is unlikely to be forthcoming. Of course, there is another feature of both compatibilist- and incompatibilist-friendly intuitions that one might employ to suggest that they are mistaken – namely, the fact that they support compatibilism or incompatibilism, respectively. That is, one might think that there is simply a fact of the matter about whether free will is or is not compatible with determinism, and that intuitions that conflict with this fact are just plain wrong.9 Consequently, the argument goes, these intuitions are errors. Just as we shouldn’t trust folk intuitions about how an object will respond to a certain force when these intuitions conflict with the facts about physics, so we shouldn’t put any stock in folk intuitions about free agency when they conflict with the facts about this notion. Whatever we might say about this worry in other contexts, as an objection to the present descriptive position it lacks force. The question to which DV is an answer concerns what people

8 Weigel reports mean scores of 4.93 in the temporally near condition and 5.89 in the temporally distant condition; higher scores indicate greater agreement with the claim that the agent in this case acted freely (2011, 817). 9 One might hold such a view because one thinks there is simply an objective fact about whether free will is or is not compatible with determinism. (This position seems to be akin to what McKenna has in mind when he notes that “I think that there is something that free will is and something that moral responsibility is. I am a realist about these phenomena” (2009, 10).) I discuss this position further below, but wish to note here that the present objection is available to those who hold other views as well. For example, one might hold that ‘free will’ is whatever most people think it is, and that there is a fact of the matter concerning what most people think about this. On such a view, it still seems correct to say that those in the minority are just wrong, since the contours of free will are settled by the majority, and minority views fail to reflect these contours. 112

actually think about the compatibility question; whether what they think happens to be false is presently irrelevant. Consider again the analogy with physics; while facts about physics might imply that folk intuitions about how a given object will move are mistaken, they cannot show that these aren’t really folk intuitions, or that this isn’t actually what the folk think about physical motion. Likewise, the objective facts about free will (if there are such facts) cannot be used to falsify a theory about the content of pretheoretic thought relevant to this notion. Thus, while this line of response might show that folk intuitions are errors in some sense, the sense at issue is not one that challenges DV. Another consideration telling against performance error accounts of folk intuitions on the compatibility question concerns the tenacity of these intuitions. NM’s data on bypassing judgments, for example, indicate that these judgments often persist even when participants are explicitly told that bypassing is not occurring in the scenarios at issue, which suggests that such judgments represent a deeply held aspect of folk thought that is resistant to at least some counterevidence. Similarly, I suspect that when people make judgments about free will and moral responsibility, they are often committed to the accuracy of these judgments in a way that renders them fairly resilient. This is largely because even some fairly strong experimental manipulations have failed to result in general agreement on whether deterministically described agents are free and responsible: for example, the NMNT10 concrete condition of NM’s second study was preceded by language explicitly telling participants that “people’s mental states are part of the causal chains that lead to their actions,” yet 19% of the participants in this concrete condition still obtained MR/FW composite scores conducive to incompatibilism (2012, 18, emphasis in original).11 That intervention this extensive failed to suppress these incompatibilist tendencies suggests that the relevant intuitions are not easily repressed. If a corresponding claim is true of compatibilist tendencies, as I think it probably is, then the prospects for achieving general agreement on the compatibility question via experimental manipulation do not seem promising.12

10 Recall that ‘NMNT’ abbreviates Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2004; 2005; 2008). 11 While a significant number of these participants also judged that bypassing was occurring in this scenario, I argued in Chapter Five that this is not sufficient reason to treat their MR/FW judgments as errors. 12 I assume here that the types of experimental manipulation at issue are theoretically appropriate; in the absence of this assumption, general agreement might be achieved at the cost of inadmissibility. For example, simply telling participants that a deterministically described agent is free might result in a broad consensus, but such an experiment would clearly not produce evidence relevant to pretheoretic views on the compatibility question. 113

Notice that this point also tells against one route to establishing a performance error hypothesis that might otherwise be found promising. If it could be shown that those who make these ‘errors’ are disposed, upon due reflection, to retract the relevant judgments, then that consideration might be employed in an argument for the view that these judgments are best treated as mistakes. Again, though, this has not thus far proven to be the case, and I find it unlikely that future work will overturn this precedent. Suppose, for example, that NM were to convince those who judged that bypassing was occurring in their scenarios that these judgments are mistaken. Even then, I find it rather improbable that most of these participants would respond to this situation by simply discarding their (predominantly incompatibilist-friendly) free will and moral responsibility intuitions. What is more likely, in my view, is that many of them would retain these intuitions while pursuing a different justification for them. That is, they would continue to deny that the scenarios at issue allow for free will and moral responsibility, but – having been convinced that bypassing judgments are mistaken – would seek a new explanation for this fact. If this is correct, then their judgments may reflect fairly strong commitments, in the sense that these individuals may be reluctant to abandon intuitions that they see as perfectly reasonable. In fact, there is actually a modicum of evidence suggesting that even when folk are made aware of the conflict generated by contextual variation in intuitions, they fail to agree on what to do about it. In a pilot study, NK presented a summary of their data on the abstract-concrete distinction to 19 participants, pointing out that the majority response in their abstract case (according to which no one in the deterministic Universe A can be fully morally responsible) conflicts with that in its concrete variant (according to which Bill, who inhabits Universe A, is fully morally responsible) (2007, 680–1).13 When asked which of these judgments should be retained at the expense of the other, 10 participants chose the former while 9 elected to preserve the latter. NK conclude that “apparently, there is no more consensus about these issues among the folk than there is among philosophers” (2007, 681). While this data set is admittedly too small to draw any firm conclusions, it does suggest that disagreement on the compatibility question may persist beyond initial differences in intuitions. If NK’s data are representative, then the folk as a group may not agree on how best to resolve the apparent conflicts in their intuitions. In this way, their ‘considered views’ might

13 See section 3.2 for more complete descriptions of these cases. 114

illustrate the same tension exhibited in their ‘first pass’ intuitions. Thus, variation in pretheoretic judgments may outlive some degree of studied reflection on the implications of these judgments. If so, then DV is probably not going anywhere anytime soon. Collectively, these considerations appear to incline the balance of evidence against the possibility that either compatibilist- or incompatibilist-friendly intuitions on the part of the folk are systematically subject to error. Suppose, though, that this is incorrect, and that some performance error hypothesis ultimately prevails over DV. If so, then many of the pretheoretic intuitions that appear to support either compatibilism or incompatibilism do not genuinely support that thesis. Yet, even in this case there would still be significant variation in pretheoretic intuitions, albeit variation between genuine intuitions and ‘mistakes’ rather than variation between two sets of genuine intuitions. Moreover, in the absence of some mechanism for ‘correcting’ these mistakes the noted variation would continue to impact pretheoretic beliefs and practices relevant to free and responsible agency, and would therefore have many of the same practical upshots as DV itself. Consequently, the existence of this variation would remain something that theorists should address: if folk are, in certain contexts, prone to error in making these types of judgments, that should be a significant concern. In this eventuality, then, I would modify rather than abandon my commitment to descriptive variantism. In that regard, I give you DV*:

[DV*] Pretheoretic intuitions exhibit significant contextual variation with respect to their implications for beliefs and practices relevant to free will and moral responsibility.

While DV is plausible, DV* is, I submit, empirically beyond doubt. Research on this and related topics has now progressed to a point at which the existence of substantial variation along something like the abstract-concrete dimension is no longer in much dispute. In fact, the presence of this variation in issues relevant to free will now appears to be only a small part of a much larger phenomenon, since similar variation has been found to occur across a vast range of theoretically distinct domains. To offer just a few examples: Joshua Greene and his colleagues (Greene et al. 2001; Greene and Haidt 2002; Greene et al. 2004; Greene 2008; Cushman, Young, and Greene 2010)

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have amassed an impressive amount of data supporting the claim that judgments about moral permissibility are generated by (at least) two different brain processes – an emotionally charged process that tends to produce characteristically deontological judgments, and a cooler, more ‘cognitive’14 process that often outputs characteristically consequentialist judgments. Carlsmith, Darley, and Robinson (2002) found data that support a similar distinction in the domain of punishment; in a series of studies, their participants’ judgments about individual (concrete) sentencing cases were unaffected by features of these cases relevant to deterrence of future crime, despite the fact that many of these participants expressed support for deterrence theory when (abstractly) asked about it directly.15 And, finally, Klein and colleagues (2002) present data corroborating what they call the ‘scope hypothesis’, according to which recall of generalizations (e.g. ascriptions of broad personality traits), which are supported by semantic memory, tends to simultaneously prime particular episodic memories that conflict with this generalization (e.g. specific instances in which a person did not display the general personality trait attributed to them as a result of the operation of semantic memory). If this account is correct, then something similar to the contextual variability exhibited in the domain of pretheoretic judgments about free agency may also be present with respect to the operations of the memory system as a whole.16 What all this suggests is that observed variation in pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question is but one instance of much broader contextual differences in information processing. Because of this, the former variation is very much likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. If so, one important question is how, if at all, we should respond to this fact – that is, what should we do about it? While fully addressing this question would require a dissertation of its own, in the final section of this one I briefly identify some issues bearing on it,

14 See section 4.1 on this usage of ‘cognitive’ (in scare quotes). The rough idea, recall, is that ‘cognitive’ processes in the sense at issue here are affectively neutral, despite the fact that the term is also often employed to denote information processing states of any kind (including affectively valenced states). This distinction derives from remarks made by Greene himself; see Greene (2008, 40). 15 As it turns out, participants expressed support for both deterrence and retributive theories of punishment when these were explained to them, but their individual sentencing recommendations tended to track only the latter position. When specifically asked to respond as a deterrence theorist would, they tended to assign more severe punishments in every case, regardless of manipulations designed to affect deterrence features (Carlsmith, Darley, and Robinson 2002, 291–3). 16 The connection between memory – and, specifically, the work of Klein and colleagues – and variation in intuitions about free agency is discussed in greater detail in Sinnott-Armstrong (2008, 222–4). 116

and indicate a few of the directions in which I think future research on these issues might fruitfully proceed.

6.2 Implications for Future Work

If DV is correct, then many of the claims cited in Chapter Two as evincing descriptively invariantist commitments will need to be jettisoned. I suspect that the authors of some such claims will be inclined to hold that this is no great loss, on the grounds that their preferred view is the correct account of free will. If one is, with Michael McKenna, “a realist about” free will – if one thinks that “there is something that free will is” – then one may not be much concerned with descriptive commitments, at least from a theoretical perspective (2009, 10). That is, one might think that if a significant proportion of pretheoretic intuitions on the compatibility question are wrong, then so much the worse for those intuitions; perhaps philosophers should be more careful with respect to their empirical commitments, but this does little if anything to impugn their arguments.17 Now, I agree that if there is ‘something that free will is,’ and – further – if what it is does not depend on what anybody thinks about what it is, then philosophical theorizing on the metaphysics of free will might proceed without much concern for empirical data. However, several qualifications regarding this claim bear noting here. First, either or both of the antecedents to this claim might be questioned; one might, for example, be a free will ‘realist’ who thinks that ‘there is something that free will is,’ but that our beliefs about free will partly determine what it is. (Theorists of this stripe might hold that the referent of ‘free will’ exists – objectively – but that our actual mental states play some sort of causal role in fixing the reference of this term.18) In that case, DV would have significant and direct impacts on philosophical theories of free agency.

17 In section 2.4, I argued (partly in response to Sommers (2010; 2012)) that in some cases theorists’ arguments for their preferred theoretical positions are supported partly by appeal to empirical claims. If this is correct, then these philosophers’ theoretical commitments may not be as easily detached from their empirical views as the comments here suggest. Nonetheless, I set this point aside in what follows so as to focus on other considerations relevant to accounts of this type. 18 The details of such a theory would depend on a variety of factors, including the nature of reference, that I lack the space to consider in detail here. However, one way to pursue the idea would involve treating ‘free will’ as a natural kind term, the referent of which is fixed by the nature of the paradigmatic cases to which people take this term to apply. For some attempts to pursue accounts along these lines, see Flew (1955a; 1955b) and – more recently – 117

Second, even if philosophical work on the metaphysics of free will can proceed without extensive reliance on empirical data, DV has consequences for the free will debate outside the metaphysical domain. For example, epistemological questions regarding how we gain access to knowledge about the nature of free will become especially prominent if DV is true, since this implies that there is no invariant ‘commonsense notion’ that can be appealed to in order to account for our access to this knowledge. Moreover, DV raises several important questions of practical import, since it implies that actual beliefs and practices relevant to free will and moral responsibility are context-variant. (I briefly elaborate on this point momentarily.) At the very least, then, philosophers may want to supplement their metaphysical theories with some discussion of how these theories can be reconciled with those beliefs and practices. To do so, it will be important to account for DV. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if the most adequate response to the descriptive compatibility question entails DV, then it seems to me that most invariantist accounts of free will are best interpreted, both by their authors and by others, primarily as responses to the prescriptive version of this question. (Recall from Chapter One that the prescriptive compatibility question concerns what, all things considered, people should think about whether free will is compatible with determinism, whereas the descriptive compatibility question addresses what people do in fact think about this issue.) Even if there is an invariant and objectively correct position on whether free will is compatible with determinism, DV suggests that this position is not the one (or, at least, not the only one) reflected in commonsense thought on this issue. Consequently, I think theorists committed to ‘objective invariantism’ are on safer ground if they hold that their preferred view is the response we should give to the compatibility question – because it’s objectively correct – and not that it is the one we do in fact give, since the latter (as I have argued at length here) needs to account for DV. Those without these commitments may do well to adopt a similar approach: if one thinks that there is not an objectively correct response to the compatibility question, or is agnostic on the issue, then one might still take DV to raise important questions regarding whether what we do say about free will meshes with what we should say about it. Perhaps some revision of commonsense beliefs or practices relevant to free will would prove desirable on theoretical or practical grounds.

Heller (1996); van Inwagen (1983) replies to the former, and Daw and Alter (2001) to the latter. (The more recent of these debates involves discussion of the ‘causal theory of reference’ originally developed by Putnam (1962; 1973; 1975) and Kripke (1972).) I take no stand here on whether such accounts are, or can be, adequately defended. 118

Prescriptive Theses

PC PI PV

DC 1 2 3

DI 4 5 6

Descriptive ThesesDescriptive DV 7 8 9

Figure 5: Possible views on free will.

Thus, adopting DV in response to the descriptive compatibility question leads naturally to issues relevant to prescriptive theorizing; future work on free will may benefit from addressing these issues. As a first step in this regard, note that it is possible to formulate a prescriptive analog of DV: ‘prescriptive variantism’ (PV) would hold, roughly, that we ought to think about free will as variant with respect to its compatibility with determinism. PV might be conjoined with prescriptive analogs of compatibilism and incompatibilism – call them PC and PI, respectively – to yield a logical space of possible positions on free agency resembling that depicted in Figure 5. Within this figure, box 1 and box 5 correspond most closely to traditional compatibilism and traditional incompatibilism, respectively; each proposes that commonsense notions of free will are descriptively invariant, and recommends retaining these invariant notions in prescriptive theorizing. Box 9 represents a conservative variantism that advocates preserving descriptive contextual variability in prescriptive accounts of free agency. The remaining possibilities represent various forms of revisionist accounts; these are theories that explicitly recommend departing from pretheoretic commitments on the compatibility question. If DV is correct, then conservative variantism (box 9) and revisionist invariantism (boxes 7 and 8) represent the most promising options for philosophical theorizing. As it happens, I am not alone in this assessing the prospects for accounts of free agency along these lines; Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk (2007) and Knobe and Doris (2010) reach a similar conclusion after

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evaluating empirical data on pretheoretic intuitions about moral responsibility.19 They, though, tentatively suggest that a conservative variantism (box 9) may be preferable to revisionist accounts, whereas I am inclined to be rather more pessimistic about the prospects of variantism in the prescriptive arena. Space constraints preclude detailed discussion of the point here, but I can say briefly that, in my view, variation in pretheoretic notions of free agency is likely to generate (and to already have generated) significant practical conflicts and associated difficulties with respect to various social and interpersonal practices; this, I think, should be avoided if possible. Take, for example, the criminal justice system. If contextual factors can indeed affect judgments relevant to free will and moral responsibility, then the very same person might be judged to have acted freely and responsibly in some contexts while, in others, she is held to have performed the very same action unfreely and to lack responsibility for that action. It is thus entirely possible – indeed, I find it quite likely – that juries may be swayed in their verdicts by the skillful presentation of a defendant along a particular contextual dimension. Moreover, the laws and legal notions that these jurors are asked to apply are formulated, debated, and refined in contexts that are primarily abstract. I would therefore not be at all surprised if legal notions like mens rea, for example, correspond to a body of abstract theory that illustrates significant conflict with jurors’ concrete applications of this notion to particular defendants.20 Similar considerations hold for various other practices, including other components of the legal system, interpersonal relations, public policy, education, and a host of others. Insofar as we wish to avoid these conflicts, then, we have reason to investigate the extent to which revision towards invariantism is feasible – both in terms of whether its expected consequences would indeed prove desirable, all things considered, and in terms of whether it is in fact possible to modify the psychological mechanisms (or their outputs, operations, etc.) that give rise to the contextual variability highlighted here.21

19 In fact, my use of ‘variantism’ is borrowed from these authors; see the introductions to Chapters One and Two. 20 Mens rea, literally translated ‘guilty mind,’ roughly addresses the mental states (including, e.g., knowledge of the fact that one’s action is criminal) that must accompany an act in order for an agent to be legitimately treated as having violated the law by committing that act. (The ‘insanity defense,’ for example, involves the failure to satisfy mens rea.) Whether empirical data shows that jurors’ interpretations of this and related notions may be problematic has been the subject of increasing recent discussion in the literature; see especially Malle and Nelson (2003), Ross and Shestowsky (2003), Greene and Cohen (2004), Gazzaniga and Steven (2005), Nadelhoffer (2008), Gazzaniga (2011), Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2011), and the collection of essays in Malatesti and McMillan (2010). 21 Note that conflicts like this would arise even if some performance error account were to successfully undermine DV. Even then, contextual variation would persist, and would therefore continue to generate issues like those noted 120

Of course, one might think that practical considerations such as these are simply irrelevant to what we should say about free will; this may be especially true of those who think that there is an objective fact of the matter about what free will is. These individuals will have theoretical reasons for adopting a particular prescriptive position, and such reasons may be assessed on their merits. Still, insofar as what we should say about free will differs from what we do say about it (perhaps because what we should say corresponds to objective facts about free will), researchers have ample reason to investigate the extent to which the latter is or is not amenable to revision. In this way, we might determine whether it is indeed possible to align commonsense beliefs and practices with theoretical prescriptions, including prescriptions advocated on the basis of (alleged) objective facts. In general, then, I take the truth of DV to suggest that revisionism should be taken seriously as a philosophical position on free agency.22 Of course, the details of such an account may vary widely even within the range represented here; for example, theories that recommend revising away from variantism toward compatibilism can differ with respect to numerous factors relating to the details of both their descriptive and prescriptive accounts, as well the relations postulated between the two. Generally, though, it is open to prescriptive compatibilists who come to endorse DV to advocate giving up on the incompatibilist attitudes that tend to accompany abstract, non-affective contexts; similarly, prescriptive incompatibilists may endorse withholding the compatibilist-friendly judgments that typically occur in concrete or emotionally charged situations. Each such view represents a prima facie viable revisionist position. Consequently, revisionism emerges from this discussion as a strong contender in theorizing about free agency. One might worry, however, that this characterization makes revisionism too easy. If DV is correct, then aren’t basically all theories revisionist? This worry is raised by McKenna (2009)

above. I take it, then, that research into the malleability of judgments and practices relevant to free will would be desirable even if something like DV* were to replace DV, in the hope that conflicts like these might be minimized. 22 The leading proponent of this position in the philosophical literature is Manuel Vargas (2005; 2007a; 2009; 2011; 2013). Officially, Vargas’s theory represents a variant of the accounts encapsulated by box 4 of Figure 5. (This is because his prescriptive position is compatibilist, while he maintains that the correct descriptive view is “folk conceptual incompatibilism” – see section 2.2.) However, given the characterization of DV offered in Chapter Two, and in light of Vargas’s contention that pretheoretic intuitions have both compatibilist and incompatibilist elements, his theory is perhaps most adequately interpreted as a version of the position represented by box 7. The discussion here thus differs from Vargas’s mostly with respect to its characterization of the contours of possible descriptive positions (e.g. many of the descriptive accounts that his view would label as “folk conceptual incompatibilist” theories are classified here as committed to DV). I suspect that we mostly agree with respect to the specific nature of pretheoretic intuitions relevant to the compatibility question. 121

in critiquing Vargas’s (2007a; 2007b) revisionist account; brief consideration of his comments may prove helpful here. McKenna contends that moral responsibility “is not as some might take it to be, in particular, those who think that it is the sort of thing which would justify a person’s eternal suffering for a mortal wrong…to the extent that this excessive retributivist element is built into the ordinary concept of moral responsibility, I for one wish to be counted as a revisionist about the ordinary concept” (10).23 He continues:

To the extent that all of us as philosophers adopt a critical eye toward the folk concepts of free will and moral responsibility, and to the extent that we all – or most of us – take ourselves to be departing just a bit, at least here and there, from our ordinary, commonsense way of thinking, aren’t most of us, maybe all of us, revisionist? I take it that this would not be good news for Vargas but bad news, since he characterizes his position as in contrast with others’. (McKenna 2009, 10)

In a review of the work to which McKenna is responding, I concurred with this position, suggesting that “perhaps…we are all a little revisionist” (Miller 2009, 413). While I still agree with this conclusion regarding Vargas’s depiction of revisionism as expressed in that work, Vargas (2011; 2013) has modified this depiction to the extent that I am no longer sure the criticism applies.24 It also does not appear to apply in the present context, for several reasons. First, this context is expressly concerned with the compatibility question. Whatever we say about various

23 A notion of moral responsibility along the lines that McKenna rejects here – that is, one according to which “if we have it then it makes sense, at least, to propose that it could be just to punish some of us with torment in hell and reward others with bliss in heaven” – is famously considered in detail by Galen Strawson (2010, 2, emphasis in original; see also G. Strawson 2003). Notably, Strawson does argue, in accordance with McKenna’s claims, that this notion is ‘built into’ pretheoretic views on responsibility; this aspect of Strawson’s view was discussed briefly above in section 2.4. 24 The issues here are complex, but I can say (oversimplifying a bit) that my earlier objection to Vargas turned primarily on his characterization of ‘moderate’ revisionism – which he called “the paradigmatic variety of revisionism” – as “revisionism about what the folk think” (2007b, 217). In my (2009), I suggested that most philosophical theories of free will count as moderately revisionist on this characterization, insofar as the majority of them depart from ‘what the folk think’ in some respect or other. However, Vargas now characterizes revisionist views as “those on which the proposed prescriptive account conflicts with the diagnostic [i.e., in the terminology adopted here, ‘descriptive’] account” (2011, 460). (He no longer distinguishes ‘moderate’ revisionism from other revisionist accounts.) Although I remain uncertain as to whether this new characterization is fully satisfactory, it does strike me as an improvement over Vargas’s earlier portrayal of revisionism. 122

other aspects of free and responsible agency (e.g. whether folk notions of responsibility are excessively retributivist), I take it that most philosophers (including, I suspect, McKenna himself) do not take themselves to be departing from pretheoretic thought on the compatibility issue specifically. Second (and relatedly), revision with respect to the compatibility question does not constitute ‘departing just a bit, at least here and there’ from ordinary pretheoretic notions. It is, rather, a significant departure from these notions, and one that is likely to involve advocating substantial changes to everyday beliefs and practices. Finally, I agree that if DV is true, then virtually all philosophical theories of free will do in fact depart from commonsense beliefs about this notion insofar as they are invariantist about the compatibility question – but I deny that this makes them revisionist theories. The ‘revisionist’ label as I understand it here requires explicit departure from folk thought on free agency; such accounts must be self- conscious in advocating modifications to existing belief structures. As I argued in Chapter Two, the vast majority of extant philosophical accounts on this issue are not self-conscious in this way. Suppose, though, that the authors of these accounts became aware of these departures from folk thought – suppose, that is, that they were to come to accept that DV is true. What stops them from simply declaring that their accounts are revisionist, and continuing with business as usual? Well, for one thing, the resulting account may lack a principled justification for its departures from pretheoretic belief. As Vargas notes, “the revisionist about free will is not entitled to be revisionist about any aspect of the theory that is inconvenient” (Vargas 2007a, 152). It is incumbent on revisionists to defend their departures from commonsense; they cannot simply ignore pretheoretic thought whenever that happens to be theoretically expedient.25 Moreover, even theorists offering ‘realist’ accounts of free will that do not appeal to pretheoretic thought can benefit from explicitly acknowledging their departures from DV. These theorists may have a pre-existing justification for revising away from commonsense notions, insofar as they hold that what we should say about free will corresponds with objective facts about this notion. Nonetheless, as I noted above, identifying their departures from pretheoretic thought may help these theorists discern whether and how existing beliefs and practices relevant to free will can be brought into alignment with their accounts. Thus, it seems to me that theorists

25 Vargas, in this regard, suggests that revisionist accounts should meet at least two constraints on departures from commonsense: “a standard of naturalistic plausibility and a standard of normative adequacy. The standard of naturalistic plausibility demands that any proposal be compatible with a broadly scientific worldview. The standard of normative adequacy requires that the prescriptive theory of free will function appropriately with respect to the various normative burdens of a theory of free will” (2007a, 153). 123

of all stripes should aim to recognize and address the areas in which their views deviate from commonsense notions; in many cases, doing so would involve supplementing their existing accounts with some clarification regarding the extent and character of any proposed revisions. Finally, if philosophers were to develop arguments for departing from DV, and thus become explicitly revisionist with respect to the compatibility question, I take it that this would be good news for revisionism indeed. Every account desires adherents in this sense – incompatibilists want converts to incompatibilism, and compatibilists try to persuade people that compatibilism is true. Revisionists should have similar aspirations. If this is the sense in which it turns out that revisionism cannot be characterized by its contrasts with other views, revisionists need not worry. Far from being a problem, this would vindicate their position. Readers may be wondering if I have any specific suggestions concerning the direction in which revision might proceed. While I lack the space to address this issue in anywhere near the requisite detail, I can say that revision towards compatibilism strikes me as the most initially plausible position for both practical and theoretical reasons. Practically, I think the distinctions between actions that are free and unfree, and for which agents are morally responsible or not, serve important social functions, and compatibilist accounts can insulate these distinctions against some scientific challenges arising from the possibility that determinism, or something rather like it,26 is true of us. Moreover, prescriptive compatibilism may require less revision than prescriptive incompatibilism. All else equal, it may be easier to learn to ‘think concretely’ in abstract situations than vice versa, because the affective reactions that often accompany concrete contexts might prove less malleable than the more ‘cognitive’ processes associated with abstraction. Finally, the theoretical advantages of incompatibilism over compatibilism seem slight. Ultimately, free will is about control, and I am not convinced that indeterminism alone can secure any control beyond that accessible in deterministic worlds.27 For these reasons, ‘revisionist compatibilism’ strikes me as an especially appealing option, at least initially, in light

26 It may be, for example, that while subatomic particles behave indeterministically (as some have taken quantum mechanics to imply), above this level the indeterminacies ‘cancel out’ in a way that renders human behavior deterministic ‘for all intents and purposes.’ (This possibility is raised by, e.g., Roskies (2006, 421).) 27 This last claim in particular would require a great deal of additional discussion to be fully defended, as it hints at considerations relevant to the ‘luck objection,’ which has been the subject of extensive recent debate in the literature. For book-length treatments of the subject, see Mele (2006) and Levy (2011). Clarke (2003) considers the types and degrees of control available on various libertarian accounts; while not exclusively devoted to the luck objection, his discussion includes an extended treatment of this objection that bears directly on several of the considerations presently at issue. 124

of the foregoing considerations. Whether such a view is ultimately tenable, though, is an open question, and one that must be pursued at a later date. I conclude, then, that the preceding diagnosis of pretheoretic thought as entailing DV appears to be conducive to revisionist accounts in general, and revisionist compatibilism in particular. Whether these appearances are veridical, in the sense that such accounts do indeed merit strong consideration as responses to the prescriptive question, is an issue that may benefit from further examination. In particular, a more complete discussion of the potential advantages and drawbacks of revisionist accounts would be desirable, and a suitably detailed investigation of the extent to which revision is psychologically possible has yet to be conducted.28 While I cannot pursue these matters further here, I have no doubt that forthcoming philosophical and empirical research will continue to shed light on them, and can only hope that in my own future work I may be able to contribute in some small way to this important discussion.

28 To date, the most comprehensive treatment of revisionism in the philosophical literature is Vargas (2013). There, Vargas offers a compelling defense of his preferred revisionist theory, which is developed in ways compatible with the suggestions offered here, and certainly deserves serious consideration in light of the foregoing discussion. Nonetheless, I think further examination may lead to the development of revisionist alternatives to this account that are also worthy of consideration. 125

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jason S. Miller was born in Ohio, where he spent most of his childhood. He attended college at Ohio University, graduating in 2002 with a B.A. in English and minor in Philosophy. Jason entered graduate school at Florida State University in 2006, earning his Master’s degree in Philosophy in 2008. His primary research interests presently include free will and moral responsibility, experimental philosophy, and the philosophy of action; he also studies cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of law.

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