For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures

Do we have (in)compatibilist intuitions? Surveying experimental research

This article critically examines the experimental philosophy of free will, particularly the interplay between ordinary individuals' compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. It explores key insights from research studies that propose "natural compatibilism" and "natural incompatibilism". These studies reveal a complex landscape of folk intuitions, where participants appear to exhibit both types of intuitions. Here, we examine error theories, which purport to explain the coexistence of apparently contradictory intuitions: the Affective Performance Error hypothesis, the "Free Will No Matter What" hypothesis, the Bypassing hypothesis, and the Intrusion hypothesis, and the article explores the cognitive errors that could shape individuals' inconsistent perceptions of free will. We then explore three possibilities regarding folk intuitions: most individuals may hold either compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions, both simultaneously, or neither. Our aim is to deepen the understanding of the complex dynamics of intuitions about free will, and we close with suggestions for future studies in experimental philosophy.

The ambiguity of "true" in English, German, and Chinese

Through a series of empirical studies involving native speakers of English, German, and Chinese, this paper reveals that the predicate "true" is inherently ambiguous in the empirical domain. Truth statements such as "It is true that Tom is at the party" seem to be ambivalent between two readings. On the first reading, the statement means "Reality is such that Tom is at the party." On the second reading, the statement means "According to what X believes, Tom is at the party." While there appear to exist some cross-cultural differences in the interpretation of the statements, the overall findings robustly indicate that "true" has multiple meanings in the realm of empirical matters.

Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedom

Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that people who assert freedom in a determined (D) or counterfactual-intervener (CI) scenario assert this because they are thinking about freedom from constraint and not about freedom from determination (in D) or from inevitability (in CI). We also hypothesized that people who deny that freedom in D or in CI deny this because they are thinking about freedom from determination or from inevitability, respectively, and not about freedom from constraint. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two main online studies. Study I supported our hypotheses that people who deny freedom in D and CI are thinking about freedom from determinism and from inevitability, respectively, but these participants seemed to think about freedom from constraint when they were later considering modified scenarios where acts were not determined or inevitable. Study II investigated a contrary bypassing hypothesis that those who deny freedom in D denied this because they took determinism to exclude mental causation and hence to exclude freedom from constraint. We found that participants who took determinism to exclude freedom generally did not deny causation by mental states, here represented by desires and decisions. Their responses regarding causation by desires and decisions at most weakly mediated the relation between determinism and freedom or responsibility among this subgroup of our participants. These results speak against the bypassing hypothesis and in favor of our hypothesis that these participants were not thinking about freedom from constraint.

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and -linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.

The weirdness of belief in free will

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English "free will" with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of "free will" do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.

Natural Compatibilism, Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this "natural compatibilism" is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.

Legal decision-making and the abstract/concrete paradox

Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called 'abstract/concrete paradox' also jeopardizes the consistency of judicial reasoning. In a series of experiments, both lay and professional judges sometimes reached opposite conclusions when reasoning about concrete cases versus the underlying issues formulated in abstract terms. This effect emerged whether participants reasoned with broad principles, such as human dignity, or narrow rules, and was largest among individuals high in trait empathy. Finally, to understand whether people reflectively endorse the discrepancy between abstract and concrete resolutions, we examined their reactions when evaluating both, either simultaneously or sequentially. These approaches revealed no single pattern across lay and expert populations, or exploratory and confirmatory studies. Taken together, our studies suggest that empathic concern plays a greater role in guiding the judicial resolution of concrete cases than in illuminating judges' professed standards-which may result in concrete decisions in violation of their own abstract principles.