Ethics

Roskies and Nichols on Responsibility

By Adam Kolber

A paper by Adina Roskies and Shaun Nichols, entitled "Bringing Moral Responisibility Down to Earth," is forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy.  Here is a sample from the introduction:

It has frequently been claimed that the folk are incompatibilists about freedom and moral responsibility ? that they believe that freedom is not possible in a deterministic universe, and that if you are not free, you are not morally responsible.3 Thus Kane claims, "In my experience, most ordinary persons start out as natural incompatibilists."4 And Pereboom writes, "Beginning students typically recoil at the compatibilist response to the problem of moral responsibility." 5 Of course, other philosophers have suggested that the common view is actually compatibilist.6

 

 The nature of our intuitions about free will and moral responsibility is not, however, purely a matter of a priori debate. What the folk think is an empirical question, and one which can be addressed by what is coming to be known as "experimental philosophy". Recently, experimental philosophical approaches have yielded conflicting results as to whether the folk are, in general, compatibilists or incompatibilists about moral responsibility. Nahmias and colleagues had subjects assume that determinism is true, and then judge whether an agent is blameworthy under those circumstances. They found that subjects tended to say that the agent was blameworthy.7 Using a different experimental design, Nichols & Knobe (2007) presented subjects with a description of an alternate universe that is deterministic, and they found that subjects tended to say that agents were not responsible in that universe.8

 

 This pattern of conflicting results suggests that subtle features about the way questions about moral responsibility are framed may have an effect upon our intuitions. There are a number of differences between the experiments done by Nahmias et al. and those done by Nichols and Knobe. But for present purposes, we are interested in just one of these differences. In some of the experiments by Nahmias et al., the scenario was depicted as holding of our own world, whereas in the experiments by Nichols & Knobe, the scenarios were always set in an alternate universe. For our experiment here, we wanted to see what would happen if we posed questions that differ only in whether the hypothetical situation was set in our own universe or another. On the face of it, one would expect that responses to a hypothetical situation would depend solely upon features of that situation, and not upon the subject?s relation to that situation. Thus, one might expect that responses to questions about freedom and responsibility would be independent of whether those questions were couched in terms of our universe, or another universe just like ours. In the following experiment, we tested this expectation.

(Hat tip: Carter Snead).

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on January 08, 2009 (boomark / email).