Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism

Abstract

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments–and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.

Political differences in free will belief are driven by differences in moralization

“…Implications and Directions for Future Research The findings reported in this paper have theoretical implications for both the psychology of free will belief and political psychology. First, these findings provide further and more direct support for previous work conducted on free will belief as motivated social cognition (Clark, Baumeister, et al, 2017;Clark et al, 2014;Clark, Shniderman, et al, 2018;Clark, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2019;Vonasch et al, 2017). The work reported here demonstrates that belief in free will is linked to a desire to hold people accountable for their moral wrongdoing, and that free will attributions vary as a function of the valence of the action, how moral or immoral it is perceived to be, and even who the target is.…”

“…In moral reasoning, desires to blame and to hold individuals morally responsible compel people to produce rational explanations that would justify their moral judgments (Alicke, 2000;Clark et al, 2015). Indeed, a growing body of research has demonstrated that the desire to hold individuals morally accountable for their immoral behaviors can lead to motivated judgments that such immoral behaviors are intended, under the agent's control, and freely chosen (Alicke, 1992(Alicke, , 2000Alicke, Rose, & Bloom, 2011;Clark et al, 2014;Clark, Bauman, Kamble, & Knowles, 2017;Clark, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2019;Cushman, Knobe, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008;Hamlin & Baron, 2014;Knobe, 2003;Knobe & Fraser, 2008;Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006;Phillips & Knobe, 2009).…”

“…We conducted a preliminary test of our hypothesis by assessing whether tendencies to hold others morally responsible for blameworthy actions mediate the relationship between conservative ideology and belief in free will. The Free Will and Determinism Scale-Plus (FAD-Plus; Paulhus & Carey, 2011) is probably the most widely used free will belief scale, but it is routinely criticized for confounding free will and moral responsibility for blameworthy actions (Clark et al, 2014;Clark, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2019;Monroe & Ysidron, 2019). Items such as "Criminals are totally responsible for the bad things they do" and "People must take full responsibility for any bad choices they make" measure beliefs about how blameworthy people generally are for bad actions more than beliefs about freedom and control.…”

Natural Compatibilism, Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics

“…Despite these two limitations, we believe that we have made a valuable contribution to the literature by problematizing two key pieces of evidence that have been used to bolster natural compatibilism. When considered against the backdrop of the extant research that suggests either that incompatibilism is the default view or that compatibilist intuitions are driven by epistemically problematic psychological processes like performance errors, motivated cognition, affective bias, intrusion effects, and the like (Clark, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2019;Feltz et al, 2009;Feltz & Millan 2013;Nadelhoffer et al, 2014;Nadelhoffer et al, 2019a;2019b;Nichols & Knobe 2007;Rose, 2019;Rose, forthcoming;Rose et al, 2016;Roskies & Nichols, 2008;Sarkissian et al, 2010;Wisniewski et al, 2019), our findings further complicate the project of compatibilists who want to align their view with common sense. This is not to say that the case is closed when it comes to natural compatibilism (see for example Turri, 2017a;2017b).…”

Free Will, Self‐Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck

“…In future work, we could strengthen the case for the source‐paradox solution by arguing that resistance to the source paradox may be due to motivated reasoning. For instance, recent research in experimental philosophy suggests that people—and perhaps philosophers even more so (due the “paradox of expertise”)—respond in a biased way to arguments against the existence of free will and moral responsibility because they do not want to accept that conclusion (Clark et al ).…”